XI.

In visible ways and ways of deferred visibility, accountability will not be stopped.
 
Climate change is a public health issue. Petrochemical monopoly is a global health issue,
 
materialized as undegradable microplastics, landfill leachate, and incinerated greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating climate disaster and ocean acidification.

Is this a pandemic health issue?—Yes, evidence confirms, as we make more areas of the earth inhospitable, as we continue to fragment and eradicate ecosystems, as both human and animal life are pressed to seek habitable ground, this conflict of unbuffered contact is dangerous for zoonotic pathogen transmission. We witness the ongoing human costs and bear the lasting psychological, socioeconomic, and traumatic toll of such a transmission event. 
 
It is too lazy to scapegoat the behaviors of communities on the margin or cultures on the other end of the globe, without confronting the scientific evidence of ecological interdependency or acknowledging our consumer positionality.
 
It is important to consider ourselves empowered by choice—not between one product to another, but as facilitators of system processes, for which we are integral participants and receivers. We make the world we possess. If we make our collective voices heard loud enough, it is inevitable that we move away from choices toxic to our survival.

Many of us live with this conflict of creative outlet and consumptive cost— the generation of production waste or aspirational consumer lifestyle habits. To rechannel our unease, we might reimagine the creative role apart from product-oriented designers to practitioners within sustainable systems.

It's pathetically earnest, but I think about the weight of climate change in every choice available to me. Recycling is a diversion, a narrative misdirection to individual responsibility to obscure petrochemical monopoly. Absurd beyond measure, that single-use disposables should be created from eternal materials.
 
Profit is just unpaid labor. Prioritizing human desires seals our spectatorship. Manmade hierarchies of control are a cancer-like, pathogenic psychology.

How do I help clarify the connection between colonization, inhospitability, and pathogenicity?—Industrial manmade ecologies have cost us 3 million lives and counting this year.