It’s become fashionable in the age of scientific portent to chide humanity for its conquest of nature. Film sequences routinely render human settlements as a mindless overgrowth, an invasive menace like lantern-flies or zebra mussels. We should have known our place, been comfortable with less. Please. We’ve had antibiotics for less than a hundred years, and everyone from peasants to the very rich were likely to know the agony of a lost child. Until 1900 the survival rate past five years for all children was 57%, and only 30% of babies made it to a second birthday. Most people in most places suffered. But residents of the 21st century think we should look back at the aqueducts or La Sagrada Familia or the Hoover Dam or whatever as gloating selfies posed in front of earth heaving on her sick bed.

Species guilt is a strange thing to ask of a visitor to a $2 billion digital tennis ball in a desert resort town built by gangsters. I think people are amazing. We had other problems before and figured those out. Now we have new ones, and we’ll do it again. Mope less, live more!