We opened the box. And wonders came out.

At first, what came out looked miraculous.

COAL

Energy beyond anything humanity had known. Factories. Steam engines. Railways. Mass production. Wealth.

We reached deeper. 

OIL

The possibilities seemed endless.

STEAM. ELECTRICITY. ENGINEERING.

SCIENCE. MEDICINE. INVENTION. DISCOVERY.

Cars. Aircraft. Plastics. Fertilisers. Global trade. Consumer abundance. Things previous generations could barely have imagined.

And we congratulated ourselves.

We had conquered distance.

Conquered nature.

Perhaps even conquered scarcity, if you were rich anyway.

Machines could do the work of hundreds. Trains crossed countries. Electricity illuminated the darkness.

Medicine defeated diseases that had killed us for millennia.

Food could be produced and transported on previously unimaginable scales.

Information travelled around the world.

Human lives became longer, healthier and, for many, easier.

It was extraordinary.

But we’d reached too deeply. More things were crawling out.

COLONIALISM. EXTRACTION. EXPLOITATION. CONSUMERISM. ADDICTION.

Old appetites found powerful new machines.

An economic system increasingly dependent upon producing, consuming and growing. More resources. More energy. More stuff. Cannibalising the planet.

And then came.

CORPORATIONS. BILLIONAIRES. INEQUALITY. LOBBYISTS. NEOLIBERALISM. PRIVATISATION. DEREGULATION.

CORRUPTION. LIES. GREED.

And somewhere amongst all that prosperity was something nobody could see.

GREENHOUSE GASES

Carbon dioxide. Methane. And others.

More and more of it. The scientists noticed. They warned us. We carried on. Then the consequences started coming out of the box.

GLOBAL HEATING

Then.

HEATWAVES. FLOODS. WILDFIRES. DROUGHT.

DYING RIVERS AND FORESTS. FAILING HARVESTS. RISING SEAS. COLLAPSING ECOSYSTEMS.

And behind them.

FOOD INSECURITY. FAMINE. DISPLACEMENT. CONFLICT.

MASS EXTINCTION.

Still we carried on. We were told changing course would be too expensive. We were told we couldn’t afford Net Zero. We were told another oil field wouldn’t make much difference. 

Another airport. Another pipeline. Another year.

Another delay.

We demanded to know the price of acting, but rarely asked the price of doing nothing.

But, the box had given us something else.

KNOWLEDGE. INGENUITY. COOPERATION. CONNECTION.

We understood what was happening. We had many of the tools to change direction. What we lacked was the collective will to use them.

Until eventually there was almost nothing left in Pandora’s box. Almost.

Because the ancient story says that one thing remained.

HOPE

But hope isn’t sitting at home believing somebody will eventually sort this out. Hope is something you do. 

It is the scientist who keeps warning.

The farmer restoring their soil.

The community protecting its river.

The engineer building something better.

The person standing for election.

The neighbour helping a neighbour.

The activist refusing to look away.

The ordinary person deciding that…

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Hope becomes:

ACTIVE HOPE

And when enough people act on it, hope becomes something else.

RESISTANCE

Not because we know we will win.

Because the box is open.

Because the consequences are still escaping.

Because every fraction of a degree matters. Every species matters. Every harvest matters. Every home matters. Every life matters.

Because every action matters. And action sustains us.

And because the ending of this story has not yet been written.

RESIST