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.

The Extinction Test

One of the reasons I became interested in humanity's extinction was because it provides a clear test of whether a set of actions is good or evil. If your actions contribute to extinction, then they are evil (but you aren't). If your actions help avoid it, then they are toward the good end of the spectrum between good and evil. The rationale for this is based on placing the highest value on human life, because without humans there can be no values.

Another reason for my interest was awareness of a non-zero probability that it could happen in my lifetime. While studying the energy crisis as a teenager in 1976, before I ever heard of global warming, I realized that the pursuit of unlimited energy consumption could mean a hothouse-like death if it was confined to our planet, which forced a decision between limiting our consumption or moving it into space. 

Nearly two decades later, after the famous impact of a comet with Jupiter, I prepared a presentation to my local astronomy club on the potential for the impact of a comet or asteroid with Earth, and learned that it was a serious threat to the survival of our species. This was in addition to the long-term inevitability that our planet and all life on it would be exterminated by our Sun warming as part of its natural aging process. Asteroid impacts and solar warming also made the case for at least some people leaving Earth so some of us could survive.

So began my research into the possible ways that humanity could not only avoid extinction, but maximize the number of people over time. This and some happy accidents drew me to the growing movement inside and outside the professional space community to pursue the settlement of Mars. As a founding member of the Mars Society, I promoted that vision while investigating the limits of the ultimate goal: settling the rest of the Universe. 

While trying to estimate how many people could live on another planet, I became familiar with the estimation of how many people could live on this one. Space enthusiasts and environmentalists have long had an adversarial relationship due to a fundamental disagreement about both the existence and acceptability of limits to human activity, and until I began seriously studying the issues I came down on the space enthusiasts' side of that debate. 

Another chance event, my attendance of a lecture by prominent physicist Albert Bartlett on the consequences of exponential growth, especially regarding energy supply and consumption, convinced me that the environmentalists had a point. It wasn't lost on me that I should have seen it myself with years of studying and using both math and physics. 

An update of a famous study relating human behavior to environmental impact provided more detail which I could use to inform my research, and made an even more convincing case that people could conceivably die off, on any settled world such as our own, long before an asteroid impact or solar event did them in.

In 2005 my research became a presentation to the Mars Society, along with a published paper. It concluded with several options:

1. Change nothing and commit to a minimal population living a brutal life.
   
   
2. Stretch our resources on Earth with a limited population living well until natural disaster strikes. Deflect asteroids to extend that time.
   
   
3. Settle the Solar System and have a large population until the Sun dies.
   
   
4. While settling the Solar System, develop the technology for stellar travel, which may help us outlast the Sun.

After thirteen years of studying ecology, social science, environmental science, and many related subjects, as well as constructing additional mathematical models, I think it's highly probable that extinction is imminent: we have pursued the first option for too long, making it far too optimistic and ruling out the remaining options.

Still, those last two options beckon. My imagination has run wild with ways to yet make them viable, fueled by insights from my latest mathematical model. Exploring those ways and how to make them a reality is why I quit my job, along with realizing that the alternative was a life of failure and despair that would not be worth living.

The Fix timeline is one of those ways. It is a variant of the second option that might help most of us survive for a few decades, if we're lucky, and create a new version of civilization that would be able to responsibly take the next steps: settling other planets. To live for more than short exploration periods on far less habitable worlds than ours, settlers would need to have a basic commitment to sustainability – both physically and socially – with a default respect for all life they encounter since that life would already be adapted to survival in the environment. 

Commitment to sustainability and respect for life would have already been learned as a basic requirement for living on Earth, and may therefore take more than one generation to cultivate before leaving. This points to another way of making a large interplanetary population possible given the short window of opportunity we have to avoid our immediate fate: overwhelming social pressure to enforce the requirements for living in that future world now. The brief amount of time we can live in relative comfort that kills our future selves would be jettisoned like going on a crash diet with the impending absence of food.

While considering the difficulty of these and other ways to save the future, I must remind the reader as well as myself that we are all subject to the extinction test, whether we choose to be or not: assisting the death of our species is the ultimate evil.

Reset

It became painfully clear in April that I could no longer live with business as usual. Following my own instincts on a part-time basis while yielding to those of others the rest of the time just wasn't working. A constant barrage of news that made the stress of awaiting terrorist attacks after 9/11/2001 feel like a lazy day at the park was also a factor. The trigger for acting to change it, though, was the result of upgrades to my Timelines model which I had tailored to reflect how multiple variables changed within the world's population over most of civilization's history based on identification of what was likely causing those changes. The model confirmed with more than 80% confidence that there is, at most, a two-year window to reduce the chance of humanity's population from suffering a major decline that could likely lead to our extinction in twenty years. I had a moral obligation to use what I'd learned to take maximum advantage of that window.

I quit my job and worked full time on figuring out the next steps, among them how I could collaborate with others committed to the same cause and develop resources to continue. The first step was obvious: rolling out the new version of the model as a starting point for discussion. I was under no preconception that what I had was ideal, nor fully tested, but it was good enough to reproduce the problem in sufficient detail to identify potential fixes. As I started the rollout, I discovered with the advantage of full-time effort a few minor bugs in the model, and fixing them suggested other modifications that made it more robust than before. I also decided to investigate historical context which might provide guidance in interpreting (and further testing) the numbers in terms of actual experience; and its earliest insights helped outline the first narrative in the rollout. 

Meanwhile, I was sucked back into the Rabbit Hole. The minimal progress made on various environmental, economic, and social fronts by the last U.S. administration while being obstructed at every turn by its political opposition has been aggressively reversed, and the goals guiding that progress – which I interpret to include increasing decency, fairness, health, and safety for all – have become harder to reach. In response to this I felt also compelled by moral obligation, but on a more visceral level. 

As the youngest student during most of my school years I was terrorized by bullies and developed an almost autonomic reflex to stand up to them and fight if necessary. That reflex has been activated more times than I can count since November of 2016, but social norms and a deep pride in personal decency have immensely limited its expression, mostly on social media, where recently my self-control has waned in proportion the magnitude and frequency of assaults on what – and who – I consider good. Calling out bad behavior can only go so far in stopping it; like the bullies I faced in school, its protagonists may need more solid resistance.

One of my favorite T.V. shows of all time is Star Trek (the original series). Its design as a set of morality plays often showcased innovative, if sometimes imperfect, conflict resolution. The characters on each side of a conflict had eventually-identifiable motivations, capabilities, and weaknesses, just as people do in reality. Changing motivation was a typical first option: find common needs and wants, and discover a way for both sides to get them (or at least not lose them) without fighting. Identifying the others' weaknesses and developing a strategy to exploit them was another option, employed when the first option looked like it might fail. A third option was to assess or develop capabilities that could be used to minimize the damage from confrontation or avoid it altogether (even if one or both sides wanted it). Key to success in any of these strategies was understanding and eventual respect by at least one side of any potential conflict. That those lessons still resonate fifty years after I was first introduced to them is both a testimony to great storytelling – one of the reasons I'm attracted to writing fiction – and their universal applicability to human (or human-like) relations.

Understanding and respect are never a given; they must be developed because of their dependence on the specifics of each situation. That work requires motivation, which is tied into the determination of whether conflict or cooperation (absence or resolution of conflict) will be the main dynamic between two parties. If one side's motivation is limited to dominating or destroying the other side and it is capable of doing so (including prohibiting escape), then conflict is inevitable and somebody is going to get hurt or dead as a result. People who have a hard time believing that there is anyone who can't be reasoned with may try to avoid that possibility by putting extra effort into their own understanding and respect, inviting the risk of losing a conflict already in progress.

In the U.S. there there have been multiple conflicts in progress during most of my life, with the sides easy to spot. As a child in the Washington D.C. area during the 1960s I saw riots in the streets and news stories on T.V. about self-identified groups of people with economic and social power hoarding it to the detriment of those they didn't identify with, and fighting or instigating wars to preserve the ability to do so. As has been the case in other countries, religion was used to both define some of those groups and justify their actions based on questionable history, and even more questionable understanding of cause-and-effect. There was also a conflict we are all involved in, between humanity and Earth's other species, with the most horrific of consequences for us and them if we "win": extinction.

My personal efforts at understanding simply reinforce that last observation, which has been known for decades but not believed by most people. It is still hard for me to believe, though intellectually I consider it a certainty. As a member of a "can-do" culture that holds unlimited growth to be a supreme value, and someone who spent most of his life believing (and being nurtured by others with the same belief) in an exclusively omnipotent being that un-verifiably promises an afterlife if we just worship it/Him, the idea that ultimate winning causes ultimate loss is overwhelming. It also calls into serious question a vast network of interrelated beliefs that would render it untrue, and that form a basis for the identity of many groups that view themselves as superior to other people and other species so that they can have a clear conscience as they take what the others have.

In a way, I see the battle between reality and voluntary delusion being played out in the news these days as akin to how a person might react to a diagnosis of an unintentionally self-inflicted terminal illness, and a long-shot, painful course of treatment that would only delay death by a short amount. That person could choose to be in a state of denial like that many are in now, hanging onto the idea of doing what they're doing until it is unquestionably proven fatal by the end result. Accepting responsibility for the illness a more psychologically challenging alternative, with all the issues and feelings it brings up (such as winning as the cause of loss). Accepting the existence of the illness and blaming others for it is yet another option, which is a very real possibility for some of the people in the real world this analogy represents, especially the poorest and least powerful among us (including children) who are as close as any of us to being clear victims. The decision about whether to take the long-shot treatment hinges on which of these reactions is chosen, with denial being the one that definitely will not lead to treatment.

As someone who values both truth and life, I choose to fight for both while realizing that it is very likely too late to make a difference in the outcome. The necessary is worth doing, even if it is impossible.

Beyond the Rabbit Hole

For weeks I have been fighting episodes of physical pain and depression triggered by what I've come to call "going down the Rabbit Hole." Direct experience or news leads to a cascade of thoughts about its meaning at all scales, accompanied by a mix of anger, helplessness, and despair that cannot be expressed productively to effectively delay, stop, or escape the destruction of many lives in the near future. Since I built my entire value system on the avoidance of extinction, its failure is my failure, and what feels like a profound depletion of the value of my own life – especially since I continue to contribute to the source of that failure in the way I live, a hypocrite to the last.

Seeing over a decade of predictions coming true provides no solace, and no useful guidance about what to do next. I had focused most of my energy trying to understand it and figure out how to stop it, while sharing the results of that search with as much passion and reason as I could muster. What was a tiny amount of remaining hope a year ago was dashed by the election of leaders whose words and actions strongly support just the opposite: growth at any cost, including the extermination of humanity – except for them and their families – as well as any other species that get in their way.

Attempts to focus onto doing and celebrating as much good as possible – like a dying patient working though his bucket list – have been overwhelmed by the torrent of news about far too many others doing just the opposite. I fall easily back into troubleshooting mode, and from there back into the Rabbit Hole.

As I write, there has just been another horrific mass shooting, beckoning for me to learn who and what was responsible. I am drawn to watch a crazy routine of identifying short-term answers that won't yield any lasting effects, because such acts are a symptom of something that resides in all of us, something we fear addressing more than the consequences of not doing so: the capacity to objectify other people to the point where their lives mean nothing relative to our own. Such reflection is just a taste of what it's like to go down the Rabbit Hole, which as part of a vast network of tunnel-like understanding connecting many experiences, is the same as the network itself.

Intellectually, I know that to get beyond the Rabbit Hole, to get beyond the pain it triggers and the death it represents, a new set of experiences must be discovered, described, and felt at a deep, visceral level – made as real as what they will ultimately replace. To draw on another metaphor, we must think and live "outside the box." In whatever time I have left, I'll try doing so, because the pain is becoming too much to bear.

No Winners

The world now the faces the very real possibility of a nuclear war between the U.S. and North Korea that the entire world would lose. In addition to massive loss of human life resulting from even a limited exchange of such weapons, the already overstressed populations of other species we all depend upon for survival would crash if forced to also deal with the environmental effects, accelerating our headlong rush toward extinction.

Complicating any attempts to avoid such a scenario is the delusion that surviving it is still possible, along with an apparent unwillingness by both adversaries to accept responsibility for the costs. This is a special case of the threat we already face as a species, where large groups of consumers are unwilling to accept the impossibility of perpetual growth or the responsibility for its pursuit crippling our planet's ecosystems to the point where further damage will reduce our ability to survive.

The most rational way to deal with both threats is for everyone to recognize their costs, agree that they are unacceptable, and commit to doing whatever it takes to eliminate them. We would have to admit that no one is better than anyone else in the sense even the last person to live would not be "winner," but rather the most pathetic loser in the history of the world. As a minimum, the two people facing off today must admit this fact and believe it.

Loss and Resolve

Recent events in the Arctic have confirmed that global warming is self-sustaining, which along with accelerated extinction rates and other news has led me to believe that my worst-case projections of future global trends are likely correct. For several months I attempted to create a global survival plan that mapped out this and other threats to humanity and what we might do to confront them, but the results of this year's U.S. election, especially at the national level, appears to have nullified even a remote possibility of enacting such a plan and saving our species from extinction in the very near term.

It is small consolation that I did what I thought I could to fight against this outcome even as my research exposed that it is an inevitable consequence of our nature. Loss of hope had not squashed my lack of acceptance as I made a case for delaying the outcome for as long as possible; but at least in this country there was just too large a fraction of the population that either didn't care, or wasn't even paying attention to basic facts that belied their beliefs (including the obvious clues about the evil they were about to unleash).

I zeroed in on what I could personally control by enacting a plan to cut back on my own contribution to the drive toward oblivion: paying off credit, developing ways to scale back on my ecological footprint, and exposing through writing how people in a healthy world might live, as compared to our own dying world. It remains a fact that although it may soon be more possible for people to exceed limits of planetary habitability, we don't have to act on it. More specifically: if they drill for more oil, we can still avoid buying it. If more jobs become available in what I think of as the planet-killing sector of the economy, we can refuse to take those jobs. As protections are removed from our food, drugs, and financial industry, then we are justified in not trusting them, and seeking more reliable and responsible means to survive. I understand that "we" are likely a very small part of the world economy, but at least we can have clear consciences by contributing less to its death.

In a way I feel very sorry for the decent people who voted for the acceleration of our global nightmare. Many just want better jobs, or recovery of jobs they and their friends have lost. If we lived in the world of a century ago, which presumably is when America was "great," the costs of stripping away restrictions to growth would have been bearable, and the horrific outcome we now face would have been perhaps decades in the future (giving them enough time to live out their lives, even as the loss of future lives was ensured). I personally know a few of them, and it's not lost on me that for most of my life I had a lot in common with them.

My father remains my personal hero, and he was one of the most conservative people I've ever known. I don't know if we would be at odds with each other if he were still alive; but I do know he would have respected the results of scientific research, and perhaps would have tried, as I did, to derive his own understanding of what's happening. A child of the Great Depression, and a combatant in the world war that challenged the great fascists of the last century who are emulated by the new leaders of today, he would have at least recognized that threat, and challenged me – as he often did – to be "not just a man, but a hell of a man," and stand up for what's right as I see it. The great war of this century may already be lost; but those of us with honor and the vision to recognize it must try to delay that outcome for as long as possible.

Hope Averted

For months since projections from my research converged on a likely future for humanity that culminates in near-term extinction, I have been watching the news for evidence of whether it is true or false. I have been particularly interested in environmental news, and political news in the United States based on our disproportionately large influence on global economics and governance (not to mention its direct impact on people I know).

To maintain my sanity, I treated this effort as somewhat of an academic exercise. I even began writing a "global survival plan" to identify the full spectrum of risks to humanity and strategies to deal with them. This entire effort I documented publicly on the Internet, including almost-daily updates on Twitter. Throughout I was able to maintain a sliver of hope that my apocalyptic version of the future might be wrong or avoidable, hope that was dashed just a few days ago as the choice for president was locked in.

My hope for the future centered on the chance that people could change their values from a focus on gain for small groups to survival of the world's population in time to avoid extinction. Both politics and economics are expressions of values, and they have become unhealthily intertwined with a focus on reaching and then exceeding any and all limits to the number and complexity of artificial environments that can be created and controlled by a rapidly decreasing number of people. It is precisely this limit-seeking behavior that is responsible for our current crisis, as species critical to our planet's habitability are being starved and consumed, and physical systems such as climate that maintain healthy natural environments are putting increasing pressure on them and us.

The electoral process in the United States has narrowed the choices for president to two people who by word and deed encourage limit-seeking, but with different opinions about what social and environmental costs can be endured in the process and who should control and benefit from the environments it creates. Neither candidate seems willing to champion what to me are the two greatest values, life and longevity for the world's population, which would require repudiation of the limit-seeking that has provided their personal power, and acknowledgement of the damage, pain, and death it has caused – and threatens to cause.

A revolution is brewing here and elsewhere in the world as the personal impact of concentrated limit-seeking becomes more painful for the majority. My research has indicated that the concentration is due to a combination of resource scarcity and our economy's reward of the manipulation of money to a greater extent than what that money represents: the manipulation of physical resources to create artificial environments. Unfortunately, most of the revolution's focus has been on manifestations of the latter, economic flaw, and not on what is becoming the dominant cause: resource scarcity. That focus seems to be behind the political calculations of the revolution's leaders, which allow up to a decade or more for it to reach fruition (assuming the rational candidate and her collaborators get power), but there is much less time to deal with the resource scarcity problem.

All political and economic actors now and into the foreseeable future need to make repairing our relationship with the biosphere their top priority, while working to heal the relationships between people so we can minimize pain and death along the way. I have felt the urgency since I first discovered the dynamics behind it, and as one of those actors (as we all are now) I have struggled with my own similarly opposing priorities – self vs. planet – without satisfactory resolution. Hope that the worst outcomes could be averted sustained me, despite growing evidence that it was groundless. With what I perceive as a fatal delay now officially built into the political system of the most powerful nation on the planet, and an uncomfortably high probability that the delay will be replaced by negative action (if the Republicans win), I can no longer even act as if hope is justified.

Hope and fear both attract followers, which was starkly evident during the recent political conventions. I am not seeking followers, nor am I attracted to fear. If the longevity of our civilization and our species is as limited as it appears, then I believe we must try to make those last days as honorable and decent as possible, just as we try to do as individuals with our own, always-limited lifetimes. It's hard to remember that sometimes, especially when in the grip of despair as I have been episodically during the past three years; but writing this has helped, and I write it to also help others.

Money and Responsibility

It is likely a truism that you can't make money by trying to convince people to scale back on the consumption that feeds their happiness, at least the kind of happiness that depends on dominating Nature. Increasing that happiness is the purpose of our economy, evidenced by the fact that its size (Gross World Product) is proportional to the square of the average happiness of the world's population.

This is evident at the personal level, especially for those us who accept that we are consuming so much that we are critically degrading our planet's ability to remain habitable for species like us. Scaling back is our only rational option, but it is also the hardest option for the vast majority of us, especially since we continue believing that our economic system can still increase our happiness, and because that system has dominated so much of the world that our survival is intricately tied up with it – by making money.

I've described my own personal struggle with this in much of my writing. It is a key theme in Death Stoppers Anthology, the end of which publicly committed me to decisively following my own advice, no matter what the consequences. That advice involves scaling back on consumption and motivating others to do the same, which I am having some success with, but not enough, and not in a way that is obviously sustainable.

Like many families, my wife and I have used debt to maintain our standard of living while income has fluctuated; and since debt is a promise fundamentally based on the expectation of economic growth to pay it off (due to interest, which accrues no matter what), making more money is a personal imperative just to break even. Through the financial system, that money helps fuel growth in other parts of the economy, which ultimately makes our collective demise more likely in the near future.

Cutting back on expenses and living on a smaller income tends to put a brake on that growth; but it has a lot of negative side effects, not the least of which is the stress of feeling trapped with a huge threat hanging over your head, not only of debt but of a future when we can no longer work. While I tend to be most sensitive to the stress associated with not meeting my global responsibility, it is more normal to intensely feel this stress associated with not meeting personal responsibility. As I've written in many ways: under current circumstances, relieving one will make the other worse unless we can be desensitized to it (typically in an unhealthy way), but this will only work until we are all forced to deal with the underlying problem that is making it impossible to escape both.

In an ideal world, humanity would collectively make it impossible for any of us to take the means of survival from any others, including members of other species (reinforcing the concept of the "commons"), and make us all responsible for maintaining it. Whatever was left could be distributed by any means deemed socially acceptable, if there was anything left, which I would argue there isn't (thus, our underlying problem). This would follow a restart of global civilization with a common set of basic values and understanding of reality, along with common standards for developing each. This model would be reproduced wherever else we settled, such as other planets, with rewards for risks incurred in expanding habitable territory provided as part of the distribution of excess resources and lasting no more than a lifetime for those receiving them.

I've read about people (and know a few) who have gotten a head start on creating this ideal world for themselves and a few people closest to them. From what I can tell, they tend to be members of a small proportion of the population who come close to their limit of happiness with fewer resources than most of us, and are content to stay there. Put another way: natural environments require little modification to be suited to their wants and needs. As a result, global and personal responsibilities are largely in alignment, so stress is not an issue. Because their success is mostly a function of who they are than what they've learned (except about who they are), I don't believe it is generally transferrable to most of the population. The rest of us can still learn valuable lessons from them, though, such as the practical, physical constraints of living in a healthier world; but because we'll have less happiness by actually living that way, it won't be as popular as our alternatives without some forcing mechanism (such as reduced social acceptance and opportunities) that makes those alternatives less attractive.

Since finishing my book, the stress of personal responsibility has been growing, in large part because my wife is currently carrying the burden of paying our bills. The lessons I learned when our roles were reversed are still with me, and I have hope that my writing business can (at least temporarily) help turn my "death stopper" role into a means of reducing that stress along with the other stress it has largely alleviated. However, once again time is my enemy; making more money at another job is the quickest way to deal with the immediate problem; and the economy, like most of us, still doesn't value doing what is now the right thing, which increases the risk that I'll be compromising my way back into pain and a crisis of self respect. In the immediate future, I plan to do as much as possible to find a middle ground, balancing the two stresses and buying time to find ways of being more aggressive in doing that "right thing": helping to set the stage for the ideal world.

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.

Foxified

I have to confess: I'm a big fan of Fox. Twentieth Century Fox, that is. Three of my all-time favorite TV shows and countless movies come from there. I've been revisiting two of those shows recently, and as before they are terribly addictive. The lead character in The X-Files is named Fox, and the TVs in 24 often show Fox News as background.

Speaking of which... I hate Fox News. I hate it, not so much because it's a mouthpiece for the crazy wing of the right wing of the political “right,” but because it dares to call itself “news” when it clearly isn't. What's obvious to me now is that Fox News is really just entertainment masquerading as news. As entertainment, it's not bad at all: the actors are pretty good at what they do; heck, they routinely fool a huge number of people into thinking they do real news.

The addiction to honest entertainment has helped reduce stress enough so that the nerves around my herniated disc have finally healed. The bizarrely improbable exploits of Fox, Dana, Jack, and Chloe have allowed me to focus on work – which itself improbably assumes a scientifically and technologically advanced future – and helped cast the increasingly scary stories about climate change as something akin to an elaborate X-Files plot, which I can emotionally deal with in the same way.

If I don't think too hard, I can be almost convinced that the world is just hitting a little bump in the road, and all will be back to normal if we can just get business out of government. By the way, I've noticed that people on the right conveniently forget to call business in government by its rightful name: “corruption.” They also easily ignore the fact that businessmen-run-amok are the ultimate villains in 24, which they like for its us-versus-them plots.

While I remain convinced that the unfettered pursuit of personal power is the major contributor to the ills our planet faces, I'm under no illusion that ignorance of reality and understanding of the way the world really works aren't a close second. That's why I've been gradually reopening my eyes, which has included reading two books, “Our Dying Planet” by Peter Sale, and “Introduction to Permaculture” by Bill Mollison, the first dealing with the problem that pushed me toward what my culture considers normal, and the second dealing with one potential solution to that problem.

I'm only a few hours away from concluding the last season of 24, while in the real world I've been replacing critical stuff that's worn out over the years that I tried to get maximum wear out of everything I owned. I'm making progress on my novel, which is a good middle ground between dealing with fiction and reality – by using the fiction as I believe it should be used, as a simulation that illustrates an understanding of how the world works, and a mental exploration of how it might work or should work. I'll soon be “defoxified,” and once more, as Jack Bauer would say, “in the game.”

Deathstopping

If you've read my poem “Deathstoppers,” you probably noticed that I've been trying to follow the strategy laid out there.

The team deployed throughout the world

Its goal was crystal clear

To stop the death that threatened all

Without a shred of fear.

Whether they call themselves “environmentalists,” “sustainability activists,” “greens,” or “conservationists” (among many names), a large number of people are working toward the same ultimate goal. In my case, I've just defined a set of values which recognizes the extinction of species and destruction of ecosystems as inherently bad, and am trying to live by those values.

Its members started with the worst

The ones who didn't share

Who raped the land for fun and gain

And cared not what was fair.

They called them out for what they were

Made their acts a source of shame

No one took their money

For fear they'd share the blame.

For most of my life, I had the philosophy of “live and let live.” Out of respect (and an overdose of humility), I assumed that all but a few people ultimately wanted the same things and had the same values. With awareness and adequate tools to connect the dots about what was happening to all of us, we each contribute to a better world in our own way.

Then I found out I was wrong. A lot of people are willing to sacrifice the lives and livelihoods of others, even the future of our species, for their own personal gain. They have also adopted ideologies and beliefs that shield them from understanding or feeling responsible for their actions. Like children who haven't developed a healthy, mature empathy for others, they need to be taught – or forced – to care, so they won't harm others as well as themselves.

They will continue for as long as they are rewarded for their bad behavior, primarily through wealth and power. To stop them we have to both educate them and stop rewarding them. Like children, they need to recognize their actions as a source of shame. Choosing not to buy from them and freely using terms like “planet-killer” work toward those ends.

Next the team set out to change

How much it cost to live

By growing more of Nature

So freely it could give.

The land provided basics

Renewable each year

While factories made less and less

Of unnecessary gear.

When people have power over others' ability to meet their needs, consumption becomes decoupled from the physical reality that supports those needs. The biosphere's innate sustainability stems from the direct contribution of species to the system that provides their needs. If people are able to survive by more direct interaction with the natural world, fewer resources will be subject to the whims of others, which have historically produced far more waste.

People learned to value life

In all its varied kinds

The team showed how we're all the same

Part of a web that binds.

As we reestablish our bonds with other people and other species, we will hopefully rediscover that life is to be cherished instead of used and disposed of, because we are all part of it.

Though some remained who wanted more

The earth chose what they had

Slowly wounds began to heal

As good replaced the bad.

Disaster was averted

Death slowed to a crawl

Love and health became the rule

The team became us all.

My vision of the ideal result is summarized in these last words. It is what I hope for, and what I work for.

We are, unfortunately, still in the early phases of this process. Many of us don't even realize how much is at stake, having trained to be ignorant and accepting of the system that is ruining our world. I like to think that I'm a pretty smart person, and I didn't get it until I was in my forties. Now, in my fifties, I'm starting to be an active part of “the team,” in word and more in deed. But time is running out, and the planet-killers, I'm afraid, are winning.