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“The Earth is full,” said the man on the radio.  “It’s full of us, and it’s full of our stuff.  It’s full of our waste.  Full of our demands.”  He had one of those fat British accents, the kind she imagined required a curled, contorted tongue to produce any words at all, and she didn’t know how talking like that didn’t wear a person out before they reached the end of a thought.

Gilding was his name, Paul Gilding.  She’d have to remember to look up this Englishman to see what he did for a living.  He wasn’t a farmer, that was for sure.  Across the endless Iowa cornfields, jade, towering stalks were full of buttery kernels and ready to be harvested.  Burnt tassels waved from their tops like little flags; we surrender, we surrender, come for us with the machines, we can’t possibly grow any taller.  A marmalade sun threatened to dip into the horizon, burying itself under that full Earth for a quick sleep.  The sky was a wall of color.  But it didn’t seem full of people, or their stuff, or their waste. She hadn’t seen an actual living soul in hours, driving or walking.  The world felt downright empty.

Interstate 80 stretched out before her, into the setting sun.  For an ambitious moment, she pictured herself catching up to it.  She could really lay into the Datsun, see what it could do, and instead of turning left when she hit Des Moines, she could keep going, play cat and mouse with the sun so that it never set, was forever a half moon of lava resting impatiently on the flat land.  When she hit the Pacific she would concede to the salty border and let the sun disappear into the water.  Or she could commandeer a very fast sea vessel, and keep up the chase.  How fast could fast boats travel? The Datsun could hit but probably not maintain 80 mph; certainly a decent boat could go at least that fast. But anyway, 80 probably wasn’t enough speed to keep up with the sun.  From her school memories she dredged up the Earth’s velocity as it traveled around the sun: around 67,000 mph.  She would need a faster car.

Mr. Oh-So-British Gilding droned on about the unsustainability of human consumption and economic growth.  He must be an economist.

“So, in 2012, Mom and Dad, what was it like when you’d had the hottest decade on record for the third decade in a row, when every scientific body in the world was saying you’ve got a major problem, when the oceans were acidifying, when oil and food prices were spiking, when they were rioting in the streets of London and occupying Wall Street? When the system was so clearly breaking down, Mom and Dad, what did you do, what were you thinking?”

Jesus, these TED Talk guests.  What would she tell her kids?  She would tell them that the world was huge and messy.  That understanding basic scientific facts like ‘we will one day run out of oil so using that specific substance to make every conceivably disposable item is probably fucking stupid’ doesn’t equal some single mom in shitstown, USA opting for a locally blown glass bottle over of the BPA riddled version from Dollar General that takes $1.99 and two minutes to acquire.

That well-meaning mother will, along with 90% of the world, opt for the convenient and cheap solution. And Hannah will tell her children that it is not her fault. It is not even Hannah’s fault  Education is a form of hope. But greed usually wins.