To do: save planet

Al Gore says we have ten years to save the planet.
Ten years before we’re all fried.

I remember the person I was ten years ago. It can’t have been that long ago in the larger scheme of things. Ten years is the time it took for my frail silver oak saplings to grow into tall sturdy pillars of shade in our backyard. Ten years and me and my friends have graduated from pleated uniforms to low waist jeans since then, from comic books to boyfriends, from orange juice to screwdrivers. Ten years has seen me move several times between cities and towns and villages and slums. And ten years from now I hope to have seen much much more.

I’d flip through pages in encyclopedias when I was a kid, looking at drawings of animals I’d never be able to see since they succumbed to the mysterious extinction disease. I’ve thought about how our children will have to visit atrocities like zoos to see animals that we’ve endangered.

And to think we’ve gone and endangered ourselves. We should feel like right idiots. We might be the next millennium’s dinosaurs.
And to think, I still haven’t seen a real live platypus.