Commonplace Post

“One hundred and fifty years ago, the monster began, this country had become a place of industry. Factories grew on the landscape like weeds. Trees fell, fields were up-ended, rivers blackened. The sky choked on smoke and ash, and the people did, too, spending their days coughing and itching, their eyes turned forever toward the ground. Villages grew into towns, towns into cities. And people began to live on the earth rather than within it.”  -Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

This showed me how humans became separated from nature. The monster is a reference to the pollution and how it came to be. The industrialization age brought pollution, disease, consumerism, materialism, egoism, and many more. It spread through the world like a plague. It kills our planet just as it kills us but the separation that we created gives us the ability to ignore it. People stopped looking at the sky looking away from all the smoke and pollutants that continue to harm us. Instead of living "within" Earth and being a part of it, we have become separated and use it as a commodity.