It started in Bologna, Italy, in 2019. It was a different world back then. The word “pandemic” was something from history books, wars felt distant, and ignorance was, if not bliss, at least a comfortable default state.
A friend took me to the MAST Foundation. I didn’t know much about what we were going to see. I think there were four of us, enjoying a casual day out. MAST is a stunning place — architecturally sleek, cool, modern. We wandered through the permanent exhibitions first, looking at displays of industrial culture, playing with some immersive experiences. It was light entertainment. Technology meets art.
Then, we walked into the main exhibition hall.
It was the Anthropocene Project by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier.
I barely remember the layout of the room or the specific curation. What I remember is the feeling that settled in my stomach and never really left. It was the feeling of waking up in a burning house and realizing you’ve been holding the matches the whole time.
The Beauty of Destruction
The hall was crowded. People were milling about, looking at these gigantic, high-definition photographs. The atmosphere was civilized, even cheerful. People nodded at the composition, whispered about the lighting, perhaps discussed where to go for lunch afterwards.
I stood in front of the images, and I felt my worldview cracking.
I knew, theoretically, that humans altered the landscape. I knew about coal mines in Germany; I knew we dug holes to get resources. But I didn’t know this. I didn’t know the scale.
I saw the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy. Entire mountains sliced away until they looked like piles of sugar cubes, white and unnatural against the sky. I learned that this is where our luxury comes from: literally carved out of the planet’s flesh.
I saw the concrete tetrapods lining the coasts of China. Endless rows of grey geometric shapes replacing the natural shoreline, miles of artificial armor against an ocean we were actively antagonizing.
I saw piles of burning ivory. I saw lithium mines that turned vast landscapes into psychedelic, toxic abstract paintings. I saw lakes dyed a chemical pink that looked alien.
I realized I knew nothing. I didn’t know where the marble in our lobbies came from. I didn’t know we were paving the edge of a continent. I didn’t know that in just 150 years — a blink of an eye in geological time — we had chewed up the Earth’s surface so thoroughly that we needed a new geological epoch to describe the damage.
I bought the exhibition book. I held it in my hands, flipping through pages of terrifyingly beautiful destruction. The photos were masterpieces. The subject was suicide.
And the most disturbing part? I didn’t walk out of there feeling like anyone was going to do anything about it. There was no collective outcry. We consumed the destruction as culture, bought the catalog, and went on with our lives.
The Dangerous Logic of Jane Goodal
Part of the exhibition involved video installations, including snippets from the documentary Human. I remember watching it, mesmerized and horrified. Later, I hunted down the full film online.
There was one specific moment, a quote by Jane Goodall, that struck me like lightning. It didn’t make me sad. It made something click into place. A cold, hard gear turning in the back of my mind.
She said:
“If I were allowed to change a few things, if I had just this magic power, I would like to, without causing any pain or suffering, reduce the number of people on the planet because there’s too many of us. Our planet has finite resources, and we’re using them up. That will mean so much suffering in the future.”
Read that again.
It is a statement of absolute benevolence. She wants to prevent suffering. She wants to save the biosphere. But the logical conclusion of her wish is the removal of billions of human beings.
This quote didn’t make me an activist. It gave birth to the antagonists of my novel.
I realized that the most dangerous people in the world aren’t the ones who want to watch it burn. They are the ones who want to save it, and who have done the math. If you truly accept the images I saw in Bologna as evidence, and if you accept the finite nature of our planet, then Goodall’s logic is inescapable.
The problem isn’t the plastic. The problem isn’t the CO2. The problem is us.
The Hypocrisy at 30,000 Feet
After Bologna, I couldn’t unsee it. The filter was gone.
In December of that year, I flew to Minneapolis with KLM. I sat in my economy seat, strapped into a metal tube burning tons of kerosene to propel me across the ocean. The flight attendants served us meals in single-use aluminum trays wrapped in plastic.
I tapped on the in-flight entertainment screen. I found the “Green Initiatives” section. KLM had slick videos about how hard they were trying to be sustainable. And right next to it, I watched a documentary about the Aral Sea.
I watched a sea that had existed for thousands of years turn into a toxic desert. Why? To grow cotton. For clothes.
The irony was suffocating. I was eating from plastic, emitting carbon, watching a film about an ecological collapse caused by the fashion industry, while the airline told me they were “going green.”
It felt like a joke. A sick, cosmic joke.
I started digging deeper. I went down the rabbit hole of Fast Fashion. I learned about the “Dead White Man’s Clothes” in Ghana — mountains of our discarded H&M, Primark and Zara shirts washing up on beaches, strangling the fish. I saw the drone footage of the Atacama Desert in Chile, where dunes are made of unsold polyester trench coats that will not decompose for 200 years.
In the seven years since I started paying attention, Fast Fashion didn’t slow down. It mutated into Ultra Fast Fashion. Shein and Temu arrived, pumping out garbage at a speed and volume that makes the old industry look slow.
I watched documentaries about Coca-Cola burying a Caribbean island under plastic because they switched from glass deposit bottles to one-way plastic to save a few cents per unit.
Everywhere I looked, I saw the same pattern. Companies launched “green initiatives.” Governments held summits. Bureaucracies produced papers. And the mountains of trash just kept getting higher.
“Fridays for Future” happened. I watched the panic. I watched the protests. It felt like a lot of noise. It was performative awareness. Woke panic that generated headlines but had zero leverage against the algorithms designed to make us buy more.
We were screaming “Fire!” while pouring gasoline on the floor.
The Pandemic Proof
Then came 2020. The machinery stopped.
For a few brief months, the relentless churning of the Anthropocene paused. And what happened? The sky over New Delhi turned blue for the first time in decades. The canals in Venice cleared up. The seismic vibrations of the Earth literally quieted down because we stopped moving.
It was the final proof of concept. The planet can heal. It just needs us to stop. Jane Goodall was right. The variable preventing paradise is the volume of humanity.
Writing the End
I am not a hero in this story. I feel helpless.
In my personal life, I tried to retreat. I became a minimalist. I stopped buying new clothes completely. I tried to opt-out of the madness. But I know it’s meaningless. My refusal to buy a shirt doesn’t stop a factory in Bangladesh from making it. We have already produced the clothes to dress the next six to seven generations. It doesn’t stop Donald Trump from eyeing Greenland and the Arctic like a real estate developer looking for a new lot to pave — a scenario that seemed absurd when I first thought of it, but now feels like inevitable geopolitics.
I realized I couldn’t stop the apocalypse. So, I decided to write it.
My novel, Amatea, is not a hopeful book. It is marketed as Solarpunk, but it is the dark shadow of the genre.
Usually, Solarpunk is about how technology and nature can live in harmony. It’s about green roofs and solar panels and community gardens. But looking at the Burtynsky photos, I asked the question nobody wants to answer: How do we get there?
How do you get to the Utopia of Amatea from the garbage dump of the Anthropocene? You don’t get there by recycling. You don’t get there by tax credits.
In my book, the protagonists are students who take an “Ethics Seminar.” This seminar is a fictionalized version of my experience in Bologna. They see the pictures. They watch the documentaries. They see the Aral Sea and the plastic islands.
And they snap.
They decide to do what Jane Goodall wished for. They decide to use their brilliance to “fix” the problem by removing the cause.
My protagonist, Ruth, is the tragic figure in the middle. She is an architect. She loves structure. She grew up playing with wooden blocks and Lego, dreaming of building a better world. She designs Amatea as a sanctuary. She represents the part of me that still wants to believe we can build our way out of this.
But she is an enabler. She builds the stage for the genocide. She is manipulated by people who have accepted the dark logic of the Anthropocene.
Writing Amatea didn’t make me feel better. In fact, the book scares me. I wrote about resource wars in the Arctic, and now I see them on the news. I wrote about algorithms driving consumption, and now I see the rise of AI marketing. I wrote about a virus used as a tool, and well… we all know what happened.
I don’t think I wrote a dystopia. I fear I wrote a weather report.
I walked out of that exhibition in Bologna years ago, but a part of me never left. The “Art” was actually evidence. And the verdict is already in.
We are not going to save the world. The world will save itself — the only question is whether we are allowed to stick around for the aftermath.
My novel Amatea — Memoirs of the Last City will be released in English on February 25th. It is the story of Ruth, writing her autobiography from death row, explaining how a dream of a green city became a nightmare of exclusivity. It is a book for those who suspect that hope alone is no longer enough.
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Previously Published on substack
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