Memories of Value

Last week I was reminded on a visceral level what it is like to live with far less pollution of light, sound, air, and thought. It began with a resurgence of stress symptoms I have fought for years and learned to suppress – neck and chest pain, difficulty thinking, and chronic agitation – and transformed on the third day into a clarity I had hoped for when planning this celebration of my fifteenth wedding anniversary.

The place we picked, the area around Colorado's Gunnison River, had sparse cell phone coverage, which made it easier to avoid familiar triggers, and its beautiful natural environment could easily be imagined as part of the transition my recent theoretical explorations depicted for a more benign future than the hell-scape our world is actually facing. In many ways, it was reminiscent of family vacations as a child to Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, taken coincidentally with the period of time – the 1960s – most similar to that transition.

My favorite memory, already fading, is the ambient silence as we lay in bed, punctuated only by an occasional car or truck traveling down the dirt road, some creaking wood, and the chirping of birds. Other memories are tied to skywatching, my all-time favorite hobby, which I got to indulge at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park as part of a public star party expertly managed by a ranger and amateur astronomers, and on our final day as a witness to a gorgeous sunset. The full moon rising 50 years after the first lunar landing mission was a reminder of that hopeful pursuit that triggered my life-long love of astronomy the year before, while its orange tint caused by a distant fire's smoke along with the desecration of a star-filled sky by several satellites reminded me of the polluted peak we now occupy in human history.

A brief indulgence in social media accompanied a spurt of inspiration that yielded my only writing during the trip. Having done my best to understand and identify ways to deal with the largest problem I know, while sharing the results so others could benefit from it, I decided to focus on implementation that would be defined by a basic statement. "We are in the midst of a disaster that likely won't end until those of us alive today are long gone. Fighting is futile, but surrender is complicity. Instead, we can inhibit the evil propelling it, while creating and preserving good for as long as possible." The first part is a description of probable physical conditions. The second is a judgment call that sets the moral stage for action versus inaction. The last two parts are actions that would be required to achieve a better future, regardless of the final outcome.

Framing current events and personal actions in terms of the preservation and creation of good begs the question of how "good" should be defined. My research and writing has provided my own answer, which is the context for much of my positive experience on the vacation: optimization of happiness, longevity, and life's abundance and diversity, which is largely determined by how much of the world is occupied by natural ecosystems. The loss of those ecosystems is the heart of the "disaster" I mentioned, and reversing that loss is an obvious and critical way to end it. The futility of total reversal is due to physical processes that are amplifying the losses outside of our control in the short time we have to stop them; but what control we do have – stopping our own contribution being the most basic example – can, and should, be used to preserve what's left for as long as possible.

I returned home to news of growing "evil" – the opposite of good – as people pursuing more personal happiness force others into deadly collapse of their own, along with the rest of the world. An attenuated form of my stress returned, but I better understood its usefulness as a source of motivation and energy for taking action to deal with its trigger. Having a better sense of what action to take will go a long way toward turning that pain into something resembling its opposite, for myself and others, something I can now better recognize from experience.

Moments of Joy

Last week I found myself in a dangerous situation not unlike many I had experienced before. A recent storm had dropped several inches of snow in the middle of a deep freeze that left a glaze of ice on what little road was exposed. The responsible thing to do was to work at home, eliminating the chance of committing an act of evil: that which, by intention, increases the risk of death or pain for other people without their consent and their ability to share in any gains. There was a chance, but it was arguably small, since everyone on the roads had implicitly decided to take the same risk. After a brief call to my boss, who subtly reminded me that work at the office was expected except under extreme circumstances, I decided to attempt the drive.

My first fourteen years of driving were in the Boston area, in cars that were far less reliable than the one I now drive, and under conditions much worse than any I've encountered in the Denver area since I moved here. I remembered that as I watched cars randomly cross lanes of the highway that were hidden by the snow. A reassuring thought stream from my subconscious reminded me that I was spoiled but not unprepared, and fed me directions derived from those early years and basic knowledge that was now part of my neuron memory.

As conditions rapidly deteriorated in one part of the trip, I experienced a burst of euphoria brought about by one stark, illuminating thought: if I die soon, I'll make sure that I die happy. Every experience any of us has ever had is already locked into the Universe, which no one and nothing can destroy; the next few minutes can be good or bad, in large part based on our own actions, and they too will be locked into the fabric of spacetime. We may as well make them good.

Coincidentally, my iPod started playing the theme to the TV show "Spenser for Hire," which had been a popular addition to Boston culture when I was driving there. The euphoria was joined by nostalgia, in part for the decade-long creative binge I enjoyed while working with my father in an attempt to develop and teach self-reliance through joyful derivation and use of understanding in any situation. My memories have long cast that time in terms of building a better future, but I now grasped that they depended on experiencing a better present. My father thrived in new situations, sometimes created by making what others would consider a mistake, and learning things from them that could alter his understanding of everything else so that life was more interesting. It was easy for me to focus on those larger insights, but I had lost sight of their source in the minute-by-minute experiences that are constantly embedded in the reality of the past and should be savored as much – or more.

As the world becomes a more dangerous place in the weeks and months ahead, I'm taking that recent experience and its insights to heart, folding them into a vision of how I want to spend the rest of my life, however long or short, and holding onto the goal of embedding as much joy as possible into the Universe – moment by moment.

Enabling Life

My latest book, Death Stoppers Anthology, takes its name from a poem I wrote a few years ago called Death Stoppers that is included in the book. After writing the poem, I wrote a blog post that delved into some of its meaning; and in the new book's memoir section, I concluded that it embodies perhaps the best strategy for dealing with the global threat of ecological catastrophe that years of research has forced me to accept. Perhaps even more important for me personally, and others who may also be drawn toward depression after coming to terms with our situation, it presents a vision of what success might look like – something that can motivate us and serve as a source of hope while we do the hard work ahead.

Yesterday I had some time to appreciate some of the natural beauty around me, which here on the Front Range of Colorado is as easy as focusing on the Rockies that frame half our view. After recent snowfall, the mountains are particularly stunning, a stark overlay of both the immediate past and the distant past that both relaxes and challenges the mind. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I have spent an unhealthy fraction of my life obsessed with finding and characterizing problems, and not enough time finding and characterizing – and more importantly, experiencing – the good, in people as well as the rest of Nature. Preserving, enhancing, and proliferating that good, and providing opportunities for good that we have yet to know, is, when we value life above and beyond (while including) our own, what "death stopping" enables.

When we see ourselves as "life enablers," then both our guiding value, and what we must do to honor that value, are crystallized around a vision of the kind of world we want to be part of. Death Stoppers ends with my take on that vision:

Disaster was averted

Death slowed to a crawl

Love and health became the rule

The team became us all.

The "team," of course, is the group of people who facilitate the changes that make that vision a reality, and ultimately we all must maintain it.

The rest of the poem deals with how that can be achieved, beginning with shaming those people who "didn't share... Who raped the land for fun and gain... And cared not what was fair." Sadly such people exist; but in a social environment such as our present one, where the values that cast their behavior as bad are eroded or absent, and where, increasingly, the amoral, homicidal, and ultimately suicidal philosophy that "might makes right" dominates, resistance cannot be unified and have a decent chance of prevailing. In the poem, the team understands this, and chooses to set an example at great personal risk: "To stop the death that threatened all... Without a shred of fear." Shaming is one way to have a discussion about values, by introducing them explicitly as a reason for observable action (which is focused on stopping behavior), but such a discussion can also be facilitated by celebrating existing examples of how the alternative, preferred values translate into experience we might (and I believe most of us would) want more.

In my recent post "Evaluating Competition," I laid out a case for assessing the values that are embodied in a competition's goals, rules, and full set of consequences in order to decide whether the competition is worth our participation and our society's support. Death Stoppers displays an application of this, where the team rejects those aspects of economic competition that value the happiness of a minority over long-term fairness and survival for the majority. The team is initially assisted by many others because their individual happiness has suffered, and it must demonstrate healthy replacements for the needs that the current competition serves before its values can be fully accepted and incorporated into a longer-lasting way of living (the economic aspects of which were described in my post "Spaceship Finance").

I hold on to some hope that this process can be hastened by the shortcut of engaging people's imaginations and reasoning through words and images that simulate what living might be like in alternative futures that are based on the exercise of different values. Making them believable depends upon another major requirement for a healthy world, common (and accurate) understanding that enables both quality communication and credibility. Working on such a shortcut is one of my main motivations for pursuing a writing business, which along with my research has only now set the stage for it. Since I have limited personal resources, and because I'm frankly worn out by dwelling on the problem of apocalyptic futures, I intend to focus on describing the consequences of success in enabling life, as well as the good in the here-and-now that I was luckily reminded of yesterday.