"I feel like I'm on an endless beach, and there are a billion starfish washed up on the shore, dying around me. How can I save all of them? Do I run back home and get a bucket? Do I build a giant net? How long will that even take? The beach is endless, but my life is finite."​ I had been talking to my father about the climate crisis, and the napkin I had been toying with was long since ripped to shreds. 

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"Easy," my he said, unruffled as always. "You start with one."

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"But that won't save them all!" Parents never understand. 

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"True. But to that one starfish, it will mean the entire world." It was an earnest answer, but not one I wanted to hear.

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I sighed and threw the napkin bits out, feeling defeated. I'm from a family of engineers, and if there's one thing that engineers excel at, it's being lazy. Not "lazy" in the traditional sense of the word, idly sitting around watching clouds go by, but lazy as in, "I've automated all my work, so now I can lay around all day watching the clouds go by."

 

An engineer looks at a thousand starfish on the beach and says, "I can build a bucket for that! With a time investment of one hour, my Starfish Save Rate will increase at least tenfold! I'll be done with this much faster, and then I'll have time to lay on the beach and watch the clouds go by!"  She builds a free body diagram, prototypes, iterates, launches, and eventually ensures that no more starfish ever get beached again (forever and ever, amen). So goes the techno-futurist utopian vision. 

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But what about when there are too many starfish, too many forces, or too many variables to plug in? What if the problem is spatiotemporally infinite?​ What if the problem is too much, and you are just one small person in a large, complex world, filled with problems for which you never asked, and yet are inexplicably tasked with helping solve? 

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J.R.R. Tolkien had a wonderful answer to this in his fantasy legendarium, in which an evil, primordial power threatens the existence of all that is good and green in the world. Like me, the main character expresses dismay at the world:

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"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

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​Grazing Guild is my answer to the infinite tragedy of the present. We're in an extinction event, hurtling toward an unstable future, with the doomsday clock set at 90 seconds to midnight. We're closer than ever before to global catastrophe, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse are racing toward us. We're making decisions that don't bode well for our long-term survival, and it doesn't seem like there's going to be some deus ex machina- 

 

So what?

 

We must cheers to the bacchanal, and make sacred the time that is given to us. ​

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