Nothing Was The Same

Some people are familiar with the album title "Nothing Was The Same", by rap artist Drake. The album cover has gone on to be a factory for memes about people or things that will never go back to being the same,just for laughs. I thought about making one with Earth on the album cover, but it is not funny. Bill McKibben's "Eaarth" makes that very clear from the first page. It hits you with statistics left and right, funny enough acknowledges how abrasive the text is and lets you know you have to keep reading, the many statistics need to mean something to you. 

Nothing Was The Same Album Cover Art 2013

As you go on to read, it stops being another environmentalist talking about doomsday.. No, there are facts and so many of them and the biggest fact of them all doomsday has already happened. There is no going back, we have already fundamentally changed what is happening to us and what will happen to our children and grandchildren. Even with all our hard work, he says " We are not, in other words, going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed. We're like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 300 and had the heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue"(McKibben, 16). 

We are still eating steak, smothering it in the butter we do not have and just assuming that it will always be there. There are a few of us, who have don't butter the steak anymore, who only eat steak once in awhile and those who don't eat at all. The point is, we are already there, we are already at 300 or in carbon parts per million we are at 390. To be healthy, we need to be at wait for it... 350 and the problem is we keep living like we still have room for error. 

Earth now 2012.

The tone of this book is everything that a skeptic needs to listen to. It's funny I am reading this at a time where it is 60 degrees at the end of January in Michigan or that we just discussed tone in my Environmental Policy class. How people don't take global climate change seriously because the tone is so futuristic. 

After reading the text, I went back to look at the album cover and noticed how fitting it is that a younger Drake is looking up at an older Drake with a clear blue sky in the background. People always say "we are doing this for our grandchildren". No, we NEED to do this for us, right now.