Like a patient with cancer, news articles come back like bad test results with numbers that hit you right in the gut about the ill health of our planet. 80% of vertebrates will be gone by 2020. Greenland is melting at alarming rates. The Amazon is being clearcut. Carbon in the atmosphere has surpassed 400ppm. Etc. Etc. Is it possible to turn this sickness around? Is it possible to slow the factors like consumerism, materialism, and war that contribute to this quickening death?

Do we make last-ditch efforts to save ourselves and fellow creatures? Ramp up treatment in hopes of reversing the impending and inevitable doom? Stop one more pipeline or build a permaculture farm? Engage in community building or soothe a homeless person’s hunger for one day?

What if these healing acts are not part of actually saving the world, but part of atoning for our collective sins before we make our final transition? What if we’re simply making amends in our broken relationships, apologizing to the forests we’ve slashed with monstrous machines, the rivers we’ve polluted with our toxic chemicals, the fields stuffed like sausages with our rubbish, mountaintops we’ve raped with our coal mines?

What if we’ve got it wrong? What if we so-called lightworkers are here not to midwife the birth of a new world, but to usher the world to its death, albeit in a more conscious and enlightened way, but to its death – our death – nonetheless?