She had the typical Eastern European glower: a look of someone, as my wife often says, who ate something, which despised her in return. Or perhaps she didn’t, but the windmill of guilt churned inside her belly and spat up the same physiognomy I’ve seen elsewhere around Silesia—someone solving a differential equation, waiting in traffic, or chipping away at lignite coal.

“No, we are not handing out these materials—they are only for activists.”

The café buzzed all around her. Outside, the hints of a pea soup skyline tinged with soot from nearby smelters or just puffs of gunsmoke left over from previous battles settled in. This is Poland; there’s a war around every corner.

A table stacked with advocacy material, ready for the taking but in fact merely for faking, was positioned at the entrance. Most things here are exactly what they appear to be; dig any further and you won’t find much more. Really, that’s not just a mining metaphor. So much has already been dug up, sluiced, and packed into a smelter. Agitprop is useful because it keeps a populace eternally agitated, but it does so at high risk: To exist in perpetual rage carries the risk of binding oneself to a pattern of self-destruction. Seneca recognized this in De Ira: decision-making by anger results in outcomes we’ve come to expect from three-year-olds and politicians who are toddler-like.

A sizeable Polish factory was set behind and in front of the mines populating this corner of the country. Its byproduct remained sloughed off in the grist. It would be a challenge to discern whether there was a sufficient—and therefore necessary—difference between the loud fabricators of energy and their louder fabrications.

Much like the backdrop of a seemingly doomed if-not-godforsaken conference, was the setting for another stage of mortis in the death of environmentalism. Remember when Shellenberger and Nordhaus scribed an essay entitled, well, the “Death of Environmentalism”? It was meant to redirect a flailing green movement, of course. While the authors and many other disenchanted greenies went on to take high-powered corporate positions or seats at think tanks (or both), the piece touched upon key vulnerabilities in the archetypal model of saving the planet delivered to the world from the likes of Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold (and Thoreau and Muir before them). The pastures grew greener, the rivers bluer.

Concepts like “nature” and the “environment” as abstract and separable had been troubling for the left and right, but since those death notes were penned, thinkers on the subject have modified their views of technology, societal response, and nature all at once.

Activism and its continuously writhing incorporate a different set of radicals or nonradicals, often forcing other features to the surface. Maximum impact in the pursuit of evasive ideals is presented as a necessity, and rarely has there been an opportunity to do very little over an extended period as there is now. One is reminded of this fact constantly when analyzing the efforts of previous researchers. An axis has formed, even solidified, between age groups and the latent effects of people who are only marginally involved in activism. Your children, who may have a strong opinion about family separations or gun control or abortion rights are more likely not to volunteer for the causes they hold dear, attend a street protest, or physically converse about the subjects in question—even if they have spent hours posting, trolling, and rendering their online personas into representations of valiant warriors. The stakes at play also include stakeholders who reveal themselves transparently when they are given a hand. They may end up playing into this mold fitfully and under pressure.

So on this rare sun-pecked day in a wide city park in Poland’s dirtiest, or perhaps second-dirtiest city, the coal ash unfurled to reveal an improbable sight: young people pushed to the ground, prostrate before law enforcement, targeted by the aggressions of a 19^th Century Silesian cavalry, prepared to crush the skulls of errant hordes of saboteurs—the Silesian Uprisings?

Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager with a strident attitude, was approaching the souls around her in defiance. Living with Asperger’s or a spectrum disorder very close to it, Greta, a 13-year-old from Sweden, professed that the nations in attendance were holding the next generation hostage and would pay for it. Dearly. Somehow. She moved on to skewering the potentates and tycoons at the World Economic Forum, where the receptivity to a climate activist’s premonitions was met with the same level of acceptance as a beggar at the backdoor of the servants’ quarters.

She managed to call out the scions of wealth and global capital in the plaintive way only an annoyed, autistic teenager can, even to the point where translator earpieces began to ring inside overheated ears. That is, assuming they were listening and not eating caviar-infused oysters on the half shell. They alone likely cost more than the world population’s average annual groceries. This if not for the presence of other, direr interpretations.

Throughout the circus of the conference, and in the presence of large swaths of the global elite intermixed with the sons and daughters of Polish coal miners, it seemed most plausible the Internet had captured more attention than the occult within the Spodek. Headlines spread throughout the world, Instagram and other social media gurus were pronounced and steadfast in their critiques.

Arguably, the forces of ill being confronted are no different than those climate activists dealt with in the mid-1990s. It was fashionable to be familiar with the greenhouse effect then. We can all remember the early 2000’s when the world witnessed the first wide-scale climate demonstrations, or even as late as 2009 when the Copenhagen Agreement was on the precipice of being signed. It alone would have ensured an almost eucotastrophe to the unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution. What we have remaining is a gaping abyss we may have to fill with nuclear waste.

Global finance is still in a privileged seat, with its ability to either capitalize on carbon dioxide (commodities trading) or risk (insurance) itself. Meanwhile, the majority of governments employ scientific bodies that accept the science undergirding global climate change. Yes, there are those nagging decision makers who dispute the continued existence of the scientific method or echo a fait accompli, which would make most ennui-filled teenagers blush in its hollowness. This in response to what might as well be the End Times if conditions remain unaddressed under real, coordinated international policy frameworks. Relationships between large nongovernmental organizations like The Nature Conservancy, which when younger and leaner were hungry for a fight but are now so exhausted by the mendacity of the world they bent rather than broke. The only path forward is an advancement within the business community at large, which is…problematic after closer review. The big NGOs, or more lovingly the BINGOs, go to lunch together, share high-rise office buildings, and even display logos with similar patterns.

Ah, yes, the café. Muted and generally under-frequented, the dyspeptic Polish teenager at the front door was more than content to shuffle around fetching pamphlets and fliers covered in radiant yellows and neon. The number of international visitors, whether activist, advocate or an odd collection of all of the above, was as amused by their presence as a coal miner is by the mineshaft gangue encircling him. Radicals and the bourgeoisie may not share the same ideals, but they do share the same mode of communication: the Internet. Or, at least they share the use of social media and the assortment of superpowers conferred by it. Bomb throwers and stockbrokers are finally in the room together, separated by strings of bits and bytes.

As with the sensibilities of a tragic Russian novel, let alone a Polish one, there were numerous losses without gains at the end of 2018. The train racing toward the cliffside, the finale of this story, was meant as a call for everyone to rid themselves of trouble and the knottiness of global problems. An answer would be the fusion of what political ecologists call the “bionic self.” We are all cyborgs now, as Donna Harraway argued decades ago. We should all be comfortable with our circulatory system flowing with liquid natural gas; our respiratory system with its putrid byproduct. Embracing decay and degradation as a means to embody our own loss is an admirable pursuit.