Responsible Survival

It has been 20 months since I quit my job to complete the project that has dominated my thoughts and creativity for more than 20 years and nearly crippled me with stress and bouts of despair based on what it revealed: that humanity is overwhelmingly responsible for a mass extinction of the life on which we depend that could culminate in our own extinction within my lifetime.

I restarted the project several times over that 20 years, each with a fresh look, new data, and broader scope, in service of my goal to identify a means of assessing actions as right or wrong based on a mix of core values centering on life: its quantity, quality, and longevity (time until death for individuals, time until extinction for humanity). Much of the effort involved exploring theoretically and historically the interactions and relationships between the three. 

The set of variables I studied expanded from population size (people and other species) and resources (mass, energy, and ecological) to include happiness (life satisfaction through personalizing of one's environment), economics (Gross World Product, wealth, and inflation), median age, children, birth rate, and death rate. "Actions" included changing the amounts and types of available resources (by consumption, acquisition, destruction, and degradation) and changing the amount and types of people (procreation, killing, merging groups).

I also derived how the variables changed (and could change) over time. The results were the basis of projections into the past and future of civilization. Sets of assumptions formed different projections, each a "simulated world" whose history could be interpreted in experiential terms and compared to actual events as a test of relevance to the real world. They were also used to suggest options for making our own future better based on preferred combinations of values, which typically favored longevity and quantity of life since the projected futures based on history were unanimously showing imminent and catastrophic drops in both. Close monitoring of news reports along with personal experience convinced me that reality was tracking with the worst of my projections, and increased the urgency I felt to advance the project as far as I could on my own. 

Complicating the matter on a personal level was a need for money and a need for sanity. An obvious solution to both was the expansion of my side business as a creative writer and music creator, which helped my mental health by increasing happiness (creating the experience of an imaginary environment) in a way that could be shared with others in return for money. I pursued that solution while working on the project, sharing my research and insights about the news online, and advertising both aspects of my efforts in a fictional blog about one of the simulated worlds that is pursuing options to fight extinction based on my own. Meanwhile, my wife and I lived off her income and money saved up from my previous conventional work.

Now the project is effectively done, the accomplishment I am most proud of; but I am under no illusion that it is more than a small tool that can be applied to providing guidance for creation of a better world. I have already used it to identify a basic set of prescriptions that address the greatest crisis of our time, and am encouraged that they line up with recommendations of others who I deeply respect and know far more than me. 

The logical next step is to work on implementing those prescriptions to the extent possible, even if the probability of success is as vanishingly low as it appears. In the world of my fictional blog, that involves stopping population growth and using no more than 30% of the world's ecological resources within 20 years (I project that we currently use an average of 63%) by reducing what we consume and stopping the negative responses of natural systems that threaten to radically reduce how much we have left (what I've called "external impacts"). If humanity is successful and lucky, a sustainable population will inhabit the new world it creates.

I turned 60 recently and don't expect to survive another 20 years in even the most optimistic trajectory of the world's future (in the least optimistic, it will be less than ten). Facing that, my new goal is a no-brainer that will be a recurring New Year's resolution: "responsible survival." Now that I have a means for determining what's "responsible," such a goal is defensible and possible. Unlike the past 20 years, I will focus less on what everyone must do while following the lead of others until it feels wrong. I will focus more on leading while seeking what's right, and living so it feels that way. The result may not be the best; but I'll be damned if it isn't as good as I can make it.

Transitions

As the citizens of my fictional simulated world "Hikeyay" begin their transition to a healthier life based on the best recommendations of my multi-year effort to model humanity's past and future, I am attempting a transition of my own in a world that is headed in a very different direction.

For more than twenty-five years I have sporadically attempted to identify my own values, related goals, and means for realizing them after mostly disappointing results from studying and trying others. As I near my sixtieth birthday, that attempt is mostly complete, and I don't have much time left to act on the result – the equivalent of Hikeyay's execution of a global strategy to delay extinction as long as possible.

The competing responsibilities I've grappled with for more than a decade and wrote about in Death Stoppers Anthology are still in play. Global responsibility, anchored in humanity's survival and defined by our relationship with the rest of the biosphere, is – I know now – best served by helping other species survive and thrive by decreasing ecological impact, which reverses the drivers of extinction (habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, population, and over-harvesting). Personal responsibility, tied to maximizing individual happiness and longevity, is served by increasing personal ecological impact up to a point (the happiness peak); and is served by decreasing ecological impact if beyond that point. 

My simulations show that a globally significant number of people began passing the happiness peak after 2001, meaning that human pain and death became a consequence of not serving global responsibility. Now two-thirds of the world's population is past the peak, and the rest could be past the peak by 2030 under worst-case (and what I currently consider most likely) conditions if action isn't taken. Even if aggressive action like that contemplated in Hikeyay is taken, any delay would add more casualties and risk that consequences could multiply far beyond what even the most optimistic technologies might be able to manage.

Based on measurable variables like age and wealth, I estimate that I am at least as close to the happiness peak as the world total (a "phase" of 5.7 in the graph below). That matches my subjective experience in the realm of personal responsibility. I have always felt global responsibility, but it has grown exponentially with knowledge of my role in the future and the waning of confidence in the judgment of leaders who claim they know how to make that future better. 

The future is the result of a collaborative effort. Until now, I have chosen to mostly develop and share my own insights with others, look for ways to contribute to a comparable reality, and do what appears right until and unless it shows signs of being the opposite. With the equivalent of a better roadmap for identifying appropriate action, my new transition involves interpreting that map and trying what it suggests. 

Lethal Interaction

Like many people, I was horrified by the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. It had a particularly strong impact because I just finished a three-day vacation from paying attention to the news, which was already depressing in large part because the presidential election had been reduced to a choice between a champion of policies that are making our planet uninhabitable, and a megalomaniac who likely would speed up our demise.

Readers of my work know that I respond to emotional discomfort by attempting to understand the triggers, typically using abstractions that I invent based on experience and extensive study. Luckily I already had a basis for understanding, in the form of what I call "group interaction." Of the three types of interaction I identified (isolation, domination, and coexistence), domination seems to be preferred by mass murderers since its goal is total elimination of other groups of people.

The shooting added some momentum to the ongoing debate about guns; and here, too, my research provides some insight. Guns provide an unfair advantage to small groups, down to the individual level, in effectively stealing resources from other groups to advance their own growth. A "fair advantage," on the other hand, would be to allow motivation and population to determine the outcome of an interaction, which in practical terms would mean letting everyone have access to the same technologies. Resistance to gun availability might thus be explained as a group's fear of granting unfair advantage on one or more other groups; and the focus of such fear on government intervention might be symptomatic of isolationist preferences by people who see themselves as significantly different from those represented by the government.

The preference for isolation is a good candidate for explaining parallel debates relating to immigration and race. If people fear they will lose resources if people from another group merges with theirs, then they will try to avoid the merger. This is especially likely if the other group has apparently far fewer resources than they do, because the other group would be more motivated to take resources from them.

Those of us who favor coexistence have trouble understanding these debates, perhaps because we tend to have a very fluid identification with groups, easily changing the definition of our group to include the sum of others. I personally have no problem considering the entirety of humanity as the basis for my identity, and then shifting with understanding and familiarity to a broader identification with the rest of life on Earth. It is inconceivable that deadly force would be justified except in cases of direct threat, so its use is especially shocking.

That said, I doubt any of us is pure in identity with groups and our interaction preferences, either collectively or as individuals. For example, I expect that all of us (myself included) favor our families over other people for primarily biological reasons, with shifting degrees of allegiance to individuals based on experience and natural similarities. We have a drive to meet basic needs, for ourselves first and our self-identified groups as a close second, which includes assessment of the potential for growth in population and resource consumption. There are also situational considerations, like joining a company as an employee, and facing existential threats such as natural disasters and predation by other species. Someone who coexists as a matter of preference (like personality) may freely practice it with family and friends, but be forced to take resources from others as a requirement for meeting needs as part of a corporation seeking economic hegemony. Knowing this, I try to treat each interaction and perception of group identity as parts of a transient event, useful in the moment but subject to change without warning, which is my intellectual argument for broadening definitions as much as I do, as well as adapting to my own acknowledged ignorance about most things.

Based on my research, the most reliable way to avoid lethal violence is to have access to a large amount of resources that is not controlled by anyone else (and can't by its nature be controlled by any person or group), and that requires cooperation to acquire and process into needs and wants such as artificial environments. Such a situation has been extremely rare, and may be practically impossible now that humanity has merged both as a collection of groups, and (mostly by domination) as a species with the group representing our planet's other species that is also its primary set of resources. There may be an exception for a tiny minority of us who escape into space and approximate the ideal situation for a while, but I fear that the overwhelming majority of us are doomed to imminent painful and lethal collapse that will make our current gun violence look trivial by comparison.

Risky Views

I have taken a big risk discussing publicly my concerns and thoughts about the future of our species, which tend to question (if not outright reject) dominant beliefs in the culture that sustains me. My motivation is based on values that were commonly taught to children of my generation and then abandoned in practice, if not in rhetoric, by the vast majority of my peers (and, sporadically, myself) as a price for survival and "success." To strongly adhere to those values – primary among them, honesty – is to threaten both survival and success in the short term; yet, as I have discovered, to do otherwise is to threaten survival in the long term, and cause harm on a scale proportional to our success. Having chosen to take responsibility for both my direct and indirect harm of other people, and then other species, I have found it harder and harder to "go along to get along," especially as it has become clear that the long term is now effectively the short term.

Many other people share my concerns; and my thoughts are consistent with those of people who have been studying the big picture a lot longer than I have, with a lot more institutional credibility than I will ever achieve. Among those people are friends, acquaintances, and former coworkers. Some are actively trying to address those concerns, but the vast majority are keeping their concerns private to maintain what they have, and maximize what their families can have, for as long as possible. Some are buying time to prepare for the disaster they know is imminent, and consider warning the public as a threat to their personal survival since it might accelerate competition for resources before they could secure their own future. As I read the news and read between the lines, I suspect this experience can be generalized on a global scale.

The people who don't share those concerns are waking up to them, fast, as the deterioration of economic and environmental conditions accelerates beyond their range of previous experience and demands new explanations just so they can survive. Some of us ahead of them are willing to share our experience, welcome the chance to help them find the most accurate and useful explanations, and want to work together to maximize our chances of collectively surviving and thriving for as long as possible. We are competing with people with the most to lose, who choose to manipulate public knowledge and opinion with explanations that won't jeopardize the status quo that enables their personal power, which remains far more considerable that what the rest of us can muster.

It has been tempting to try riding out the storm, to follow the lead of those who are buying time, which I have been advised to do on multiple occasions. Even if my personal values would allow it, my public body of work, including books, blogs, and posts to social media, may have already closed the door to that alternative. As my own research, in alignment with others I respect, converged on a plausible and testable timeline for humanity's future and the variables that determine it, I came to realize that riding out the storm was never a viable option for me or the vast majority of people. The best we can do is confront it together, which I have made my life's work as both an act of love and retribution for my contribution to the storm's severity.

Confronting the storm must involve confronting its causes, chief among them the maximizing of population and happiness using all available resources, and the hope that more resources can be found before their limit is reached. For the past forty years I have been aware of this fundamental flaw in our civilization, beginning with an unwillingness to ask and answer the question "How much is enough?" with any answer other than "There is no such thing as enough." Had I followed my own instincts instead of the leadership of others, I might have pursued a much different course in my life; as it was, I didn't really start seriously seeking an answer to the question until more than twenty years later, and didn't find the answer until very recently when it was arguably too late to do anything meaningful with it.

In the months that I've been looking for a job, I've noticed that the vast majority of employers seek workers willing to work under pressure to meet tight deadlines on projects that promote the rapid growth of their business, with success defined as maximum output for minimum input (mainly labor). Presumably any resources left over and not wasted get diverted into profit, which translates into increased happiness (personalized environments) for the leaders and investors, yet the majority of workers have seen their incomes either flat or decreasing. This reflects trends I've seen in my research: average global happiness hasn't increased significantly since humanity stopped living safely off of renewable resources, with non-renewables being consumed more and used to grow more population with the same level of happiness; meanwhile, a small number of people have had their happiness grow exponentially due to our economy's amplifying of wealth based on manipulation of abstractions (money).

With limited resources, global growth – in population and happiness – should have stopped by Earth Day in 1970 to try keeping longevity (the time left for our species to survive) from shrinking; and both businesses and governments should have competed enough to find an optimum distribution of resources (and environments created from those resources) that would serve the needs of the existing population with minimal waste. That didn't happen, and now we've directly consumed or polluted so much of the Earth's biosphere that there are barely enough members of other species that keep the world habitable for us; and one major consequence of pollution – global warming – is likely to reduce their numbers even more, thus threatening our own survival. Unfortunately there are no more resources of the type we need, and there isn't enough time to find additional resources or create replacements.

We need to cut back on what we consume, clean up our waste, and allow room for other species to grow back to a healthy point if that's still possible, which it may not be. I feel compelled to try, and to work with other people who are willing to try, despite the fact that it is unpopular and personally risky; but it is more responsible than any alternatives that I see, and I choose to be responsible.

Discretionary Time

I have accumulated and discarded a lot of stuff during my nearly fifty-six years. It is a pattern that I attribute to shifting goals, needs, and dreams about what I might do with the rest of my life. While some of it has had sentimental and entertainment value, the vast majority – including a large library of books – have been viewed as tools: tools for meeting basic needs such as shelter; tools for learning and exploration; tools for creating things; and tools for communicating with others.

With likely no more than thirty years of life left, I feel the need to seriously evaluate what I can and should accomplish during that time, and to manage my stuff accordingly, especially since I don't expect to ever retire. This means, for one thing, strongly resisting the urge to buy impulsively, and to avoid influences that make it feel like a duty – such as the armada of advertisements and pervasive social cues that accompany the annual Season of Gluttony that (at least here in the U.S.) is more aligned with its historical origin in Saturnalia than the celebration of the birth of hope for salvation and universal love (Christmas) that has formally defined it.

Thirty years seems like a lot of time, but only about five of them (one-sixth, or four hours per day) are discretionary – that is, not used for sleep, eating, working, and related activities. Discretionary time, and the stuff used during it, can be split up among many activities, such as maintaining relationships with family and friends, housework, entertainment, and personal development such as education and hobbies. If we're lucky enough to be able to do what we want for work, up to ten years can be added to this category.

Much of the "stuff" I've acquired for personal development is more suited to what is normally considered "work" than what many would consider "discretionary." Creating has always been more fun than consuming, and I enjoy looking for what I think of as the hidden picture in the "jigsaw puzzle of life," a collaborative understanding of the past and future of humanity along with its environment and values. I don't pretend to have any more special insights than anyone else, but I feel an obligation to do my part, which includes communicating the parts that I see uniquely, helping others share the unique parts that they see, and making a case for my preferences in deciding the future. My stuff of choice, not surprisingly, includes aids to learning and communicating.

Over the past thirty years I came to understand that the current configuration of the puzzle has some serious flaws that need to be corrected soon in order to decrease the chance of horrific global casualties over the next thirty years and beyond. This has made my feeling of obligation even more urgent than what was already triggered by advancing age. In my blogs and books, I've shared my curiosity, my insights, and ideas that might inspire creative thought and exploration by others that can hasten assembly of the puzzle. Concurrently, I have sought to entertain, and to fictionally represent my research along with some suggestions and warnings based on imaginative extrapolation of behavior, knowledge, and technology.

A civilization like ours that is designed to maximize happiness without regard for longevity (except through continuous acquisition and processing of ecological resources) can be expected to resist any attempts to challenge that design goal and the cultural infrastructure that supports it, even as evidence mounts that the resources it depends upon are dangerously scarce and degraded. Only that which directly and efficiently serves the customization of personal environments will be rewarded. I know this, and yet I cannot, in good conscience (service to the value of life) or by nature, keep from challenging it, even when doing so severely limits options for customizing and maintaining my own environment through work and discretionary activities.

Like many people, the probability of maintaining or increasing my current lifestyle over the next thirty years is low, even if I vigorously support our happiness-based economic paradigm and global conditions don't change the way I think they will. Attempting to do so through art (as I recently rediscovered) has a much, much lower chance of success over that period, especially if it doesn't play to people's hopes and desires for experiences better suited to their wants than their current existence.

Unless we make major changes to our society, living will rapidly get more difficult over the next decades, and I expect discretionary time to practically disappear for all but the ultra-wealthy, even if the demand for it increases exponentially in response. Such a development would make much of the present discussion moot, because my thirty-year planning horizon would likely drop to something closer to ten years, yielding maybe one year of useful discretionary time left. One year interestingly coincides with the amount of time I've calculated we have left before reaching a critical ecological threshold that will make large global casualties practically inevitable, which is less than I (and everyone else) would have available if both work and discretionary time was used to try stopping it.

Martian Dreams

Watching the movie The Martian recently reminded me of the boundless hope that for most of my life motivated me to look to the stars for meaning, knowledge, and salvation from the doom that seemed to be an inevitable consequence of confining humanity – and life – to just one planet. It also inspired me to use the tools from my current research to revisit the possibility of reviving that hope.

As related in the memoir chapter of my book "Death Stoppers Anthology," that hope was a consequence of influences and events since childhood that were strongly linked to the U.S. manned space program and its showcasing of how human ingenuity could triumph over adversity and despair. During the late 1990s, I became convinced that settlement of Mars was the best next step for ensuring the long-term survival of our species and others that we could take with us. Along with other members of the Mars Society, I worked at convincing as many people as possible that manned exploration missions as a precursor for settlement could and should be launched soon. Discoveries since then, culminating in the discovery of liquid water, a necessary resource for life, have made the argument for sending people to Mars even more compelling. Clearly the author of The Martian was up to speed on the motivation and the technologies that could enable the first missions, and has provided a relatable vision that can help do the sales equivalent of "closing the deal."

Even back in my Mars Society days, I feared that escalating problems on Earth with a strong environmental dimension might soon close the door on getting people into space and supporting them long enough to create at least one self-sustaining community. The Martian does an excellent job of portraying the hazards involved in trying to sustain life for even a modest amount of time without such support in a hostile environment similar to, if not much better, than the places space travelers are likely to find themselves. The movie also demonstrates in one scene my greatest fear for our immediate future: the loss of "provider" species that enable "supporter" species to survive and generate the basic resources that people need to live. Wherever we go, beyond our planet as well as here, we will face the same limits; and early explorers and settlers in space will be precariously living very near those limits all the time.

My current research is the latest phase of work I began while in the Mars Society in order to estimate how much and how fast our population could grow if we settled space.

Preliminary simulations using the new model are consistent with my earlier conclusions, which support the observation that motivated that first project: exponential growth is fundamentally unsustainable. Like other species, but unhindered by predation that keeps their numbers in check, humanity grows as fast as it can with the objective of dominating its environment. If by settling space we expand the amount of resources that we can either reach or grow, then we will concurrently increase our consumption of them – very likely exponentially – until we either can't or decide not to.

Hope in my case stems from what I believe will occur in that last stage, and whether or not it is possible to keep our resources from decreasing on their own due to our actions. Will we as a species make the same choices as the hero in The Martian, who to me epitomizes the best of humanity in his values and unwillingness to give up in the service of something bigger than himself, or will we – as my study and extrapolation of history suggests – push the limits in pursuit of personal pleasure at the expense of other lives and ultimately our own longevity?

Action Time

I have learned a lot since I finished writing Death Stoppers Anthology last year, much of which has added justification and detail to the conclusions I reached then. In many ways, I experienced a microcosm of my life before, attempting to reconcile the need to conform to the expectations of the majority around me, for both survival and sanity, with an accelerating lack of trust in both the logic and morality of those expectations. This time, though, I had the perspective of decades of living and thinking to help make sense of it, and the experience in turn tested and refined that perspective. The net result is that I finally know enough to take specific action, and I have the conviction to go ahead with it.

Unfortunately, timing is critical, which I discussed in the latest Idea Explorer blog post, "Impacts." By any measure of practicality, my prescription for significantly extending humanity's longevity and avoiding major casualties is impossible; yet, as the self-evaluation using a set of proposed universal goals revealed, I am compelled to do whatever I can. With my particular set of skills, that means effectively writing to convince a lot of people to keep from having more than the replacement number of children and capping or reducing their consumption of ecological resources to a healthy level ("the message"). It also means more actively developing the tools I've long known are the key to short-circuiting the corrupting influences that threaten people's survival and core happiness.

So far, my creative effort has been focused on material that I personally like, and it naturally includes many themes related to the issues I care about. For example, the novel Lights Out is based on early research into limits to global population and consumption, and is in the genre of science fiction, which has been my favorite from the time I learned to read. Death Stoppers Anthology is a collection of my best writing, and includes both the most artistic and most meaningful aspects of my experience (some of which have been extracted from blogs).

Judging from sales and blog hits, I have a small but significant audience for my work, which I greatly appreciate, but it needs to grow a lot if I'm going to have an impact anywhere near what I'd like. This means that I will be vigorously marketing all of my work, and becoming more public with my views, all with the ultimate focus of promoting the message and its rationale as much and as long as is necessary.

Other people and other groups are sharing their own variants of the message for their own (and often similar) reasons, many over several decades as our world's natural limits became clearer. I am merely adding my own voice after becoming convinced on my own terms; and I urge you, my readers, to find your own terms based on your own priorities, and to do as much as you can as a result of your conclusions.

Last Years

My latest estimates show that humanity is less than two years from being forced to reduce our population's ecological footprint, and the only control we might have is in how it happens. Our options are very limited: we can reduce the total ecological impact of what all of us use, reduce our population size, or both. We may be forced to continue this reduction as natural consequences of our pollution, especially atmospheric greenhouse gases, include taking away more of our remaining resources.

I would argue, based on my values, that the only morally acceptable choice is to cooperate in reducing what we use until we either can't or (ideally) don't have to, and making that reduction with the least amount of pain possible. The alternatives all include people dying, likely on a large scale, with the worst cases including extinction of our species within a decade.

I'm sure this is all very familiar to readers of my blogs, as it is just the most recent of several passes I've taken at this extremely important subject, and is further confirmation of the conclusions I've been trying to find a convincing argument against. Even the timing is similar; I've just got a better handle on the trajectory that's gotten us here, and a more compelling explanation for the relationship I discovered between happiness and ecological footprint (as we begin to consume the resources needed by the natural providers of our own most basic biological needs, we reduce their ability to support us and thus endanger ourselves).

So, what can we do over the next two years to implement the "morally acceptable choice"?

Here in the United States, we're facing a presidential election before the two years is over. Election season, which has already begun, is an excellent time to address the issues government can – and can't – have the greatest influence over. The current field of candidates includes only two people who recognize the seriousness of climate change, which is clearly a critical requirement for anyone who holds significant political power, so something we here can do is to support one of these candidates. Another requirement is a firm commitment to reducing pain among the larger population, which is more aligned with the views of a core populist than someone in alignment with the sociopathic leanings of large corporations and their leaders who value focused power over distributed power. One obvious risk of favoring populists, though, is the potential amplification of consumption as more people gain power, so such candidates will need to be open to focusing on efficiency and other offsets, such as caps on overall consumption that are applied to everyone.

In our own lives, we can work to reduce our own ecological footprints, including actions we take at work. We can also avoid having more than two children to keep from further amplifying the global footprint. Applying social and economic pressure on others, accompanied by reasoned dialog and education, is something else we can do about the problem, and is particularly important since there is almost overwhelming pressure already to have at least as much as the people we identify with (or would like to).

If, as currently seems likely, we get through these last years of voluntary action without change in attitudes and actions that sufficiently promotes the moral choice, the world will – to say the least – become even more bizarre to those of us who remember what even a marginally healthy Earth was like (I was a preteen in the 1960s). I will personally feel very lucky to live to retirement age, if such a term even makes sense, and the feeling I have now that we are about to witness the equivalent of a massive asteroid impact will have translated into a full-sensory experience of that disaster.

Conscience And The Kings

As more of my time necessarily has become consumed with job hunting, I have discovered that the options are not much better than the last time I tried to be selective based on my values and preferred work environment. This is despite the fact that I am more aware of what I want and need based on last year's breakthroughs in research and self evaluation, making the search's filters much more refined and reliable. Having intentionally framed my values around the needs of my community, global humanity, for surviving and thriving as long as possible, the issues I'm finding with my search parallel the issues I identified on a global level, and in about the same measure.

I have resisted the urge to compromise on these issues, in line with my commitment to become a "death stopper," but I now realize that my focus has been too self-centered, striving as I have for an optimum personal situation where I am with people who share similar values working toward similar ends. Instead, I may need to do what feels like climbing back into the trenches of war, and use my new-found vision and courage to make positive change wherever I go, but in a more obvious and straightforward way than I now realize I have attempted to do in the past. Essentially, I would focus on approximating an ideal world in as many situations as possible, and make my intentions clear in the process. Realistically, I expect a lot of resistance.

I have recently been studying the field of human ecology (the research variant, rather than the "making a better life" variant), which looks like the best fit to my independent research into population and consumption, and it finds evidence that healthy societies are like healthy ecosystems in that they tend to grow to take advantage of existing resources and then to resist change. Ours is not healthy. A considerable amount of scientific research has shown that as people gain more power, they are inclined to lose their natural empathy and increasingly treat other people as objects to be manipulated to gain more power. This consequence is reflected in my population-consumption model as a mechanism for people with extreme happiness to attempt increasing it despite limits to their own ecological resources. Simplistically, conscience is short-circuited by happiness, ultimately leading to lower population as perhaps one of Nature's safety mechanisms for preserving habitable environments.

A functional government would tend to offset the negative effects, using laws to replace conscience as a protective force in people's interactions and keeping power from being too concentrated, but our (U.S.) government has been sabotaged by the powerful people who want to take more than is healthy for everyone else. This has been enabled by an economy which rewards the manipulation of money with the creation of more money, resulting in an obscene wealth distribution that is further locked in by our approach to the limits of ecological resources. A small part of the population now has enough economic power to potentially own all of the resources everyone else needs to survive. Even if all of the people in that group had fully-functioning consciences (and some likely do, since these trends are statistical, not individually determinant), they could not have the information or the time to make decisions that avoid harm to some fraction of the people whose lives they can affect. Since too much happiness has a pathological effect that makes even well-meaning harm unlikely, the underlying cause needs to be addressed soon, even if we don't consider the ecological impacts that pose an existential threat if we continue exceeding healthy consumption.

If my analysis is correct, creating an ideal world could involve something like global drug addiction treatment, perhaps by creating a safe replacement as an intermediate step that would buy time for ecosystems and social systems to recover to a more healthy state, while weaning the wealthy off their happiness high. Reshaping values and reactivating consciences would have to be built into the "replacement" so it doesn't become a permanent substitute. To some extent, the entertainment industry currently serves to give the illusion of living in a different environment, and religion manages values within an imaginary construct of reality; perhaps the replacement could use components of both to achieve the desired results, and even educate people with a more accurate understanding of how the world works. Care would need to be taken so such a tool is not misused, by for instance further concentrating power among a few people.

This and other possible remedies should be openly debated before a global roll-out, following a debate about what the common core set of values should actually be (I am presenting my own preferences here). That doesn't mean such debates and remedies can't be attempted on a small scale to judge their efficacy, as long as it is done honestly and openly with all concerned; such is the essence of the focus I suggested I might personally take in the interim. To be globally useful, though, such attempts should be coordinated and analyzed, perhaps by an academic entity as part of a science project, and I would be absolutely thrilled to take part in the project at that level (I would even love to translate the results artistically, to reach a wide audience as part of the debate over broader use).

Celebrations

I recently celebrated by fifty-fifth birthday, the first one that followed my personal transformation from a "reluctant planet-killer" into a "death stopper." As detailed in my new book, the transformation kept this birthday from becoming my last, dangling a thread of hope in place of a push over the precipice of despair about a future that looks grimmer by the day.

Since finishing the book, that hope has been manifested in an evolving vision of an ideal world. I now find myself seeing that vision overlaid with my experience of the real world, with the differences highlighted in almost overwhelming contrast. The contrast is overwhelming in large part due to coincidental timing with the consumption orgy preceding another celebration, Christmas, which cynically and hypocritically objectifies the most precious of human motivations, love, and uses it to accelerate our sabotaging the system of life that keeps the world habitable.

Despite my new-found courage and vision, I allowed some partial indulgence to mark this particular birthday, which typically signifies entrance into a sort of "pre-retirement." My wife and I stayed overnight at a local bed and breakfast, which unfortunately is now up for sale. I ate some not-so-healthy food, along with some good stuff. After more than a year of going without a watch, I finally got a replacement. I even felt okay with it, up to a point.

That point was reached during a trip to the local grocery store after we got home. There I was forcibly reminded that everyone including us is working at the equivalent of a job: buying unhealthy stuff that makes us and others unhealthy until society says we can do otherwise, which of course it will never do because too much personal power depends on it. It was craziness set to an appropriately mind-numbing musical soundtrack of repeating Christmas songs, much of whose meaning was lost in another century.

In the healthier (and more honest) version playing in my imagination, the store aisles would be replaced by an open space dominated with locally-grown food and products people had personally created. Neighbors would know each other and be committed to helping each other on a regular basis, so the "Christmas spirit" of giving would be a normal aspect of life, with competition for how much good we could do instead of how much power we could wrest from others to enhance the lives of a few close ones. The mall where I got my watch would be replaced with such markets, if anything, but more preferably it would be returned to open space that could be colonized by wildlife.

With Christmas only ten days away, the old habits are already returning. I expect I'll be compromising a bit even as my thoughts are further turned toward what a better future might look like and how to help create it.

Options For A Reluctant Planet-killer

After losing my job at the end of last year, I focused on my writing and research about global population and consumption, in large part out of hope that I could discern a future that didn't involve the rapid extinction of all species including ours. As my blog posts over that period attest, the results have been mixed.

I found that if we try to continue increasing our life expectancy following historical trends, we will quickly eliminate the resource base that keeps us alive. If we try to increase our population with a standard of living like what we have now, or better, we will soon suffer extreme casualties and then enter a prolonged period of painful instability. Hanging over our heads in any case is catastrophic global warming that appears to be practically inevitable as self-sustaining feedback mechanisms continue to kick in as the result of pollution we already put into the atmosphere and oceans.

Thinking long and hard about potential solutions, I came up with the following set of actions that, if taken immediately, could deal with the multiple threats I saw:

• Reduce consumption of ecological resources (our ecological footprint) by half and safely shut down the technologies that depend on what we will no longer use
• Safely remove all pollution, including waste from disabled technologies, from the natural environment (e.g., air, water, and soil) and neutralize its hazardous effects
• Develop and maintain a capability to deflect potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, preferably from bases in space that do not depend on Earth for resources and which can be used for settling other planets

Basically, like children whose living space is overcome with the trash they've created, we need to stop and clean up our mess. Those who resist ­- or actively impede this effort ­- need to be taught not to, or disciplined, or isolated by any adults who might still remain in our spoiled world.

I was recently forced by conditions to return to work for other people, despite my hope that I could turn my creative efforts into a paying job. I still hold on to that hope, and am trying to make it a reality, albeit at a much slower pace. My job search has been painful, as I knew it would be when I realized that the focus of our civilization, the very core orientation of our economy, is toward using everything that's left to make artificial environments for more of us that will meet most of our needs and wants, with disastrous consequences for most of us. I continue to struggle with the inherent conflict between personal responsibility as defined by that civilization which sustains me and the people who depend on me, and global responsibility, which demands that I give back much of what I – until now – have unwittingly taken to meet that personal responsibility.

As much as possible, I've limited my most active job search to "environmental" organizations, which tend to be either profit-making ventures that try to mitigate the effects of our lifestyles by regulation-inspired cleanup and substitution of more efficient products into our economic pipeline, or low to non-profit advocacy groups that try to educate people about the problems facing us and what they can do to help solve them (including manipulation of political systems to enact stronger regulations and reduce waste and corruption that gets in the way of solutions). I see their net effect as neutral, at best, in dealing with our crisis, mainly because they nibble away at the symptoms and some of the effects of the problem – our fundamental motivation – and depend on the tools and assumptions of the socio-economic system that serves that motivation and enforces the "personal responsibility" of the people embedded in it (to help others meet their needs and wants within that system).

Neutral impact is of course preferable to active destruction, which is what I see resulting from most of the other options. Those options have a spectrum, with fossil fuel and other extractive industries at the damaging end, and local organic farmers at the healthy end. The debt which forces me (through personal responsibility) to use my most marketable skills, which are resource-intensive, is held by a financial industry that largely enables the worst damage due to a fundamental flaw in our economy that encourages people to use more than they would naturally need or want by taking it from others. If I were willing to totally abandon my new-found sense of global responsibility (and my self respect), I would focus entirely on selling my skills to the highest bidders, who are likely on the damaging end of the spectrum. Instead, I tend to gravitate toward the middle of the spectrum while also considering how to get toward the healthier end.

In my ongoing battle between hope and despair, I've at least learned some more details about the alternative futures that those feeling represent, and how those futures could unfold. Having indulged the despair and nearly been crushed by it, I've chosen to understand and promote the hope, even if the conditions it hinges on are highly improbable. I am a reluctant planet-killer, trying imperfectly, though trying nonetheless, to eventually have nothing to do with killing anything or anyone, as an accomplice and certainly not otherwise. I will continue to share what I learn in order to help others do the same, even as I take detours along the way.

Thanksgiving 2011

Thanksgiving is traditionally a time for humbly recalling the ways we have benefited from kindness or luck over the previous year. Unfortunately, that tradition has mutated into the start of a month-long buying binge that dishonors both the holiday and the self-sacrificing man whose birth is celebrated at its end.

This year, I have a lot to be thankful for. As I've been for the past eight years, I am first and foremost grateful for my wife Debbie being in my life; meeting her was the single greatest bit of luck I've ever had, and every minute I spend with her feels like a gift from a caring universe, a gift I try to be worthy of. I'm also thankful for more of the ability to understand what is necessary for the world to become a better place for the majority of people, and to find more hints about how to contribute to that. I was lucky enough to have a job a large part of the year so I could meet my financial obligations and catch up on basic maintenance that had been neglected the previous year.

I will be going light on shopping during this year's Gluttony Season for a number of reasons, not the least being an uncomfortable amount of debt. Perhaps most importantly, I'm finally feeling inoculated against over-consumption, to the point that shopping has become an almost nauseating experience – though I still have a weakness for books. Having struggled with guilt over the damage my lifestyle has inflicted on the world, both now and in the future, I've even seriously considered going the radical simplicity route.

A recent calculation showed that for civilization to survive in the long-term, all of us will need to learn to live on the equivalent of $3 per hour. For the poorest countries, that would involve a considerable pay raise. For the rest of us, it will take considerable creativity to keep from losing the gains in health and freedom that have accompanied our relatively huge wealth. Despite its uniquely American origins, Thanksgiving in its purest sense can be applied to the rest of the world through our simple decision to exercise that creativity and share its fruits with others as Native Americans once shared their knowledge of sustainable survival with starving immigrants from Europe.

Overload

Yesterday something happened which gave me hope that I and others might be able to overcome one of the worst habits imaginable – shopping: I freaked out while walking though a Denver mall to get to a movie.

In retrospect, it may have had a lot to do with the fact that I've been spending a lot of time at home, mostly looking for a job. Nonetheless, I was in a state of sensory overload and disgust at all the stuff practically bulging out of the shops and the signs ordering or begging me to buy stuff I didn't need and would likely never use more than once. When I got to the theater, I sat through a continuous infomercial that was followed by countless previews, such that I felt I had seen three movies before the one I paid to see. Afterwards, I couldn't wait to leave, and believed for the first time that when I finally got work, I would be able to fight off the pressure to spend my earnings on that crap instead of paying off the debt I'd used to buy the barely-more-than-crap that I already own.

When I got home, I did what I often do. I turned on my computer. From that (er, this) expensive box, the Internet showed me a lot of useless crap I could get through the mail, festooning the almost-news and job descriptions I was really interested in reading. Next to my computer was a book I haven't finished yet, which discusses the why and how behind our interactions with each other, our artificial world, and the natural world as part of a larger ecological system that has shaped us as much as we've shaped it. But, as usual, I couldn't resist being exposed to the imaginary world inside the artificial world that is killing the natural world on which it all depends. It probably counts for something that I at least had a similar reaction to the ads on the screen that I had to their cousins in the mall: Yuck!

Later that night I got a headache while working on the sequel to my novel, which is being informed by the insights I've gained since being laid off last year. I interpreted it as both a reaction to spring pollen and chronic stress about both my future and the future of the world. Just as one of my book's characters was wondering if she could keep up with her husband and his pursuit of threats she could barely fathom, I was wondering if I could ever reclaim a sense of security in a society that is tearing itself apart. The ads insisting on my getting more stuff, and the job announcements promising high stress and heavy workloads so I could make it possible, effectively mocked such a desire, and were actively recruiting people to make sure it would be forever out of reach of everyone.

Luckily, I had cold medication to push through the symptoms and get some sleep, so I could process it today with a fresh perspective in front of the expensive little box that I bought in another mall when my defenses weren't anywhere near so high.