How We Got Here: The Century When "Away" Stopped Existing

For most of the industrial age, the organizing verb of prosperity was *away*. Smoke went away, up a chimney; waste went away, out to sea; risk went away, onto someone poorer or someone later. It worked because the planet was treated as larger than any bill we could run up on it. This century is the one in which "away" quietly ceased to exist. The carbon did not leave; it settled into a +2.8 °C anomaly that has held for months. The water did not appear elsewhere; it left the reservoirs and did not return. The people displaced did not vanish; they became a count nearing 116 million, moving along corridors that Passage Trust and Hearth Relief International try to keep humane. Historians will not mark our era by a single catastrophe but by the closing of an escape hatch we assumed was permanent. The lesson is old and unwelcome: on a finite world, everything comes back. We are learning to live where we can no longer throw things.