If you drew a half-circle on a map that captured the forest fires we drove out of a week ago and the oil spill that occurred earlier this week off the Orange County coast, our house would now be half-circumscribed by two man-made disasters. “One if by land, two if by sea,” would be the cry of an environmental Paul Revere to put it in a Revolutionary War context. Two of the Four Horseman to behold to put it in biblical terms.

   Tonight, we’re having my famous pan-seared filets with baked potato and roasted broccoli. It’s Tuesday, so It’s a wine night. And the baseball playoffs begin this evening as well. So much for the world ending with either a bang or a whimper. Ours is ending with drinks, a steak and a ball game.

   If you are on the side of the sky-is-falling crowd, your environmental laments are met with derision, condescension and bearded men playing  dress up in Kevlar and machine guns. If you are with the Hoax People, you’re bug-eyed crazy screeches are met with derision, condescension and bearded men playing dress up in throwback 70s and 80s remnants from Goodwill. And all of it playing out in perfectly theatrical precision with ominous optics. But eating steak and taking in a ball game seems Nero-like in its head-in-the-oily-sand indifference as well.

   Turns out there is no playbook to counter the destruction of a planet, when a species sets out to accomplish just that. Even aboard the Titanic, those fighting and those praying were accompanied by the ship’s orchestra to the very end. Perhaps a Concert For The Former Planet is the best we can hope for.

   There is a silver lining to this dark cloud (though the lining might be mercury and the cloud a puff of coal). Our rate of planetary decline may be outstripping our rate of social implosion

   We might have had a chance, when our white ancestors landed at Plymouth Rock. The Native Americans, whom the Pilgrims found, had already been thriving here for thousands of years and believed humans are born with obligations, rather than rights. They also believed that whatever they did on earth, they did it with a view to sustaining up to a seventh generation into the future. The white man’s response was the more “rightful” and expedient to the present generation – genocide.

   There is a silver lining to this dark cloud (though the lining might be mercury and the cloud a puff of coal). Our rate of planetary decline may be outstripping our rate of social implosion. We may run out of an inhabitable planet before we’re able once and for all to resolve Critical Race Theory, a woman’s right to choose and all the other battles of the Great Culture War. Or, even better, anti-vaxxers can beat the planet to the extinction of the most invasive species ever to inhabit it, allowing Earth to heal itself for the other species that seem to innately know a thing or two about stewardship.

   Either scenario leaves out the children. But as George Carlin once put it, “F#&k the children.”

   We could also do what Jonathan Swift suggested in 1729, and just feed the poor kids to the rich.

   Either eventuality would represent one we’ve earned and deserve.