Suzanne Harrington: I mean, really, what planet is Jeff Bezos actually on?

Wed, 12 May, 2021 - 06:00

You know when we talk about sustainability and how it makes us worried that we are not doing enough to reduce our carbon footprint? Of course, we recognise this feeling. Sustainability anxiety has been drilled into us like a mad dentist with a jackhammer.

The responsibility has been individualised, trickling down onto us in a cascade of fear and guilt. Our fault, our fault, our fault. But is it though? Is climate catastrophe really the entire fault of us, the little people with our plastic straws and our tumble driers?

Obviously, we can’t carry on the way we’ve been going, taking cheap flights around our plastic-wrapped planet, eating horror-story meat and discarding fast fashion, SUVs in the driveway.

This much is clear.

But no matter how vegan we all go, no matter how electric our cars, no matter how much we staycation instead of nipping to New York for the weekend (pre-pandemic I mean), no matter how paper our straws, or hemp our vests, the fact remains that it suits the big people perfectly to blame the little people for the planet’s ills, so that while we tie ourselves up in eco-knots, they bask unhindered on superyachts.

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB

The rage surges flashing through me at Jeff Bezos’ latest vanity project - sending wealthy individuals into space so that they can see the earth’s curvature out a rocket window – could jumpstart his launchpad.

All that money, made for Bezos by workers running around giant warehouses, (and yes, I buy stuff from Amazon, so am part of the problem,), and what does he do with it? Give it away? Try to eradicate stuff like malaria and get demonised by mad conspiracists for his trouble?

No. Bezos has decided that the best use for his incalculable wealth is not redirecting it to where it is most desperately needed – his home planet – but to splurge it into space, where, as we all know, nobody can hear you scream.

Meanwhile back here on earth, billions of us are screaming – about climate change, food shortages, water shortages, resource scarcity, and the wars, famines and forced migration that these catastrophes cause.

Bezos and his fellow squillionaires did not cause these problems – that’s been a developed world group effort, kicked off by the Industrial Revolution.

But now that half the world’s wealth is in the hands of a handful, why are they not using it to redirect the calamitous trajectory of our planet, rather than spunking it into space?

Why should we care if there is life on Mars?

It seems pretty obvious that there isn’t, that it’s a great big lump of dead red dust. Meanwhile, Earth remains teeming with life, even as we do our best to kill it.

Where is the sustainability – where is even the most rudimentary logic – in space games for the rich when the cash could be used to repair what’s in front of us, and make life on Earth sustainable beyond the next generation or two.

Plastic straws? Do me a favour.