Why We Can’t Win

Despite our environmental successes

Mike Meyer
6 min readOct 4, 2024

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

We are facing a callous reality. Having ignored all the negatives of decades of cultural and economic choices, such as our reliance on fossil fuels and consumerism, we have consistently selected people who do not understand reality as leaders.

Ignorance is not bliss when the chickens come home to roost. The consequences are not a few dozen hens but a staggering billion chickens. And they will keep coming for the next century or more.

It is already evident that minor climate disaster successes, such as reducing carbon emissions in some regions, even as they begin to mount, are overwhelmed by a billion chickens.

The idea of a billion chickens is just a way to articulate the complexity we face in an array of climate, economic, and recursive disasters.

Before anyone becomes fixated on evil chickens, this is not the chickens’ fault, just as climate disasters are not our planet’s fault. We inadvertently created a billion chickens and need to spend the foreseeable future dealing with them.

The limited solutions we have decided on to save our civilization are beginning to have consequences. These consequences are not necessarily what they appear to be: good or bad.

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Mike Meyer
Mike Meyer

Written by Mike Meyer

Writer, Educator, Campus CIO (retired) . Essays on our changing reality here, news and more at https://rlandok.substack.com/