It is so tempting right now to envision the world that we want to see, and to envision it arising from this crisis. Part of me, a big part of me, loves all the talk of building better, recovering greener, etc. And yet....

I mean I can see and taste the world of green industries, clearer skies, circular economies, water running clear, birdsong everywhere, green walls and green roofs and net zero and organic and healthy. I want all that so badly for future generations.

And yet....

In the here and now, everything about this moment feels ugly, shows the dark side, the petty ugly meanness that is the legacy of structural racism and white supremacy in this country.

The story is literally told in people's lungs. Decades of air pollution changing the structure of some lungs in some bodies because one group of people had the power to say where the coal fired power plant, the interstate highway, the refinery would go.

And another group of people lacked that power and so lived where the lung damaging stuff would go.

Which brings us to now. Same virus. Different neighborhoods. Different lungs. Different survival rates.

The wrongness of it is plain sight for us all to see. People aren't dying just from a virus. Some people dying because someone else decide to put a highway through their neighborhood decades ago, or a coal plant upwind of them.

That world I want, that world I can taste, that world where, as Wendell Berry writes, peace returns to the valley and the water runs clear, that world can't possibly grow out of the wrongness of this moment.

You can't start with something crooked and dirty and bent and tinker and innovate clean tech your way to something good and healthy and right. You've got to straighten out the foundation.

The water wont run clear, and peace won't abide in anything more than a temporary way, unless it is clear water and peaceful days for *all* of us. An ecological utopia can't rise out of the ashes of differential death rates, where the odds of dying are handed out by zip code.

That world I want is out there still. It's one future possibility. But, as it has my whole life, that future possibility will keep receding, keeping just out of reach, until a great many more of us face the ugliness of now.

The road to the beautiful - apparently, unfortunately, and as much as my mind resists it - seems to run along a route that requires facing down the ugly, first. And there's not much time to do it.