My
latest book, Death
Stoppers Anthology,
takes its name from a poem I wrote a few years ago called Death
Stoppers
that is included in the book. After writing the poem, I wrote a blog
post that delved into some of its meaning; and in the new book's
memoir section, I concluded that it embodies perhaps the best
strategy for dealing with the global threat of ecological catastrophe
that years of research has forced me to accept. Perhaps even more
important for me personally, and others who may also be drawn toward
depression after coming to terms with our situation, it presents a
vision of what success might look like – something that can
motivate us and serve as a source of hope while we do the hard work
ahead.
Yesterday
I had some time to appreciate some of the natural beauty around me,
which here on the Front Range of Colorado is as easy as focusing on
the Rockies that frame half our view. After recent snowfall, the
mountains are particularly stunning, a stark overlay of both the
immediate past and the distant past that both relaxes and challenges
the mind. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I have
spent an unhealthy fraction of my life obsessed with finding and
characterizing problems, and not enough time finding and
characterizing – and more importantly, experiencing
– the good, in people as well as the rest of Nature. Preserving,
enhancing, and proliferating that good, and providing opportunities
for good that we have yet to know, is, when we value life above and
beyond (while including) our own, what "death stopping"
enables.
When
we see ourselves as "life enablers," then both our guiding
value, and what we must do to honor that value, are crystallized
around a vision of the kind of world we want to be part of. Death
Stoppers
ends with my take on that vision:
Disaster
was averted
Death
slowed to a crawl
Love
and health became the rule
The
team became us all.
The
"team," of course, is the group of people who facilitate
the changes that make that vision a reality, and ultimately we all
must maintain it.
The
rest of the poem deals with how that can be achieved, beginning with
shaming those people who "didn't share... Who raped the land for
fun and gain... And cared not what was fair." Sadly such people
exist; but in a social environment such as our present one, where the
values that cast their behavior as bad are eroded or absent, and
where, increasingly, the amoral, homicidal, and ultimately suicidal
philosophy that "might makes right" dominates, resistance
cannot be unified and have a decent chance of prevailing. In the
poem, the team understands this, and chooses to set an example at
great personal risk: "To stop the death that threatened all...
Without a shred of fear." Shaming is one way to have a
discussion about values, by introducing them explicitly as a reason
for observable action (which is focused on stopping behavior), but
such a discussion can also be facilitated by celebrating existing
examples of how the alternative, preferred values translate into
experience we might (and I believe most of us would) want more.
In
my recent post "Evaluating
Competition," I laid out a case for assessing the values
that are embodied in a competition's goals, rules, and full set of
consequences in order to decide whether the competition is worth our
participation and our society's support. Death
Stoppers displays
an application of this,
where
the
team rejects those aspects of economic competition that value the
happiness of a minority over long-term fairness and survival for the
majority. The team is initially assisted by many others because their
individual happiness has suffered, and it must demonstrate healthy
replacements for the needs that the current competition serves before
its values can be fully accepted and incorporated into a
longer-lasting way of living (the economic aspects of which were
described in my post "Spaceship
Finance").
I
hold on to some hope that this process can be hastened by the
shortcut of engaging people's imaginations and reasoning through
words and images that simulate what living might be like in
alternative futures that are based on the exercise of different
values. Making them believable depends upon another major
requirement for a healthy world, common (and accurate)
understanding that enables both quality communication and
credibility. Working on such a shortcut is one of my main
motivations for pursuing a writing
business, which along with my
research has only now set the stage for it. Since I have limited
personal resources, and because I'm frankly worn out by dwelling on
the problem of apocalyptic futures, I intend to focus on describing
the consequences of success in enabling life, as well as the good in
the here-and-now that I was luckily reminded of yesterday.
