“I feel like I’m cornered. Caught in a series of contradictions that are impossible to resolve.”

We are all cornered (like the kitty above) and faced with contradictions, like Squarzoni. We know we have to cut down on how much CO2 we emit into the atmosphere, but we don’t do a good job at this. Greenhouse gases get emitted in every part of our lives. Gases are released from our food, our homes, our cars, and the activities we participate in. Gases are always getting released, so how can we stop it? The picture on page 217 describes exactly how I feel. It is a picture of an outline of a human and the human is made up of oil, a burger, gas, a keyboard, a phone, a plane, a car, and many other things that release CO2. Squarzoni asks “What do we cut out first?” This is a good question. What should we cut out first? Can we realistically cut out any of these things? Can we at least lower how much of these items we use? I don’t know if I can do it. Could we all at least try?

This section ends with a picture of the Earth, but not the picture we are used to seeing. It is not the perfect Earth we expect to see, but rather the Earth as it really is. This picture of the Earth has a shadow on one side of it. This reminds me of the earlier section when Squarzoni’s girlfriend was speaking about how we always picture the Earth being perfect, without a shadow on it. I’m thinking about Noria in The Memory of Water and how the Earth to her and the other people in the book is far from perfect. Earth to them probably has a shadow covering the entire planet because of how screwed up it is.