The older we get the more we are reminded that everything changes. The world we took for granted keeps morphing into new shapes. Soon we are dinosaurs, no longer at home in an alien world. In an accelerating world, it seems to happen faster to each generation.

My grandmother’s idea of refrigeration was an actual icebox cooled by blocks of ice delivered by the iceman. His vehicle was literally horse powered. She hung the laundry out to dry on clotheslines using wooden clothespins. Instead of shopping at a supermarket, she picked currents for jelly she canned, and rhubarb for pie whose crust she made with a rolling pin.

That all of that has changed is evidence of what the romantic poets called mutability and we call progress, though it may sometimes seem more like regress. Not all change is for the better, some brings with it decline, we gain but also lose. In my time we were born into an age of bulky electronic devices powered by vacuum tubes only to watch as the advent of transistors created radios one could carry around in a pocket and in time instead of back and white TVs, color flat screens big enough to cover a wall.

The latest generations are being born into an age that resembles science fiction to their elders  with its AI threatening to rule us all, cyber spying, the death of privacy. Make your own alarming list. And who knows what’s next? Except we do know, or should.

A century and a half of the industrial age began with the burning of coal then oil, the manufacture of iron and steel in what Blake called satanic mills, followed by so-called better living though chemistry: plastics, silicon, fertilizers and on and on. All of which has permitted the human population to increase between 1823 and 2023 from one billion humans to 6 billion and counting. But at what cost? 

The nuclear sword of Damocles has hung over us for the last seventy-five years. Our polluting of the planet is changing the environment that all life is adapted to. Already some of the earth’s inhabitants are being killed by their inability to survive in an altered world. Where are the lightning bugs, for instance, that once made a child’s summer evenings enchanted?

Fifteen thousand species are thought to be at risk of extinction at the moment. How many more will follow is unknown. They include leopards, tigers, elephants, gorillas, whales, dolphins, condors, falcons, cranes, beetles, butterflies, bees, plants, trees, coral reefs, fish, and, though we shrink from admitting it, us.

Life has adapted to slow alterations over millennia, but can perish when faced with abrupt, cataclysmic changes like the one caused by a collision with an asteroid that ended the 180- million-year reign of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period. 

We are now at risk of being the equivalent of our own asteroid. Scientists have begun to refer to our geological period as the Anthropocene Epoch. It is characterized not by natural changes but by manmade interference which impacts the earth’s surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling that living things have come to depend on to survive. 

We have it in our power to reverse the processes we have created that are now poisoning the air and water, causing deadly heatwaves, disrupting agricultural cycles and food chains that provide our sustenance, and spawning new plagues that spread with unprecedented speed, and cause mass migrations in search of a habitat offering a chance to survive. 

But an adapt or die future will require changes to the elaborate system of commerce and exchange, transportation, industrialization, and exploitation of the environment we have created. Those who profit from the status quo are resistant to the needed changes. They can afford to fight fixes that will come with a high cost, but not as high as extinction. Spenser gave fair warning in his mutability cantos that the arrogant, the prideful may think they can resist change but even the most powerful “Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.”