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.

Epiphany

After years of trying to develop a way to properly judge what actions are "good" and "bad" based on my values, I finally reached a point when it all came together.

It wasn't so much an intellectual epiphany as a physical one. I had already reasoned through most of the details, but now it was visceral. The first feeling was one of revulsion, and it hit me while buying food at a grocery store. There were several kinds of just about every type of products, with what I knew was very little difference between them. The embodied resources, labor, and associated waste felt like a disgusting wall of sludge slowing me down as I approached it. My shopping list shortened considerably: I focused on finding the things that provoked the least negative reaction.

When I got home, I resolved to find foods that met a few basic criteria. They would need to be healthy. They would need to be made by companies that tried to have a positive impact on people and and the rest of Nature. They would have to be things I could eat on a regular basis without getting tired of them. And there would need to be just enough to support me at my ideal weight, which at that time was nearly twenty pounds less than I weighed. If I lost weight at the fastest healthy rate, I'd need to eat an average of only two-thirds of what I would finally use every day, which meant I had to get used to being hungry for more than two months. At a different time, I would have considered this a hardship; now I actually looked forward to it.

My living conditions reflected my physical condition. With my newfound awareness, I realized that I could probably live quite happily with what could be fit in a couple of suitcases and a backpack. I had far more that that, which required a lot of effort, resources, and waste to both acquire and maintain. Much of what I owned was bought with the intention of using; each thing had its own purpose, and represented a vision of a slice of my life that I had once vividly imagined experiencing. In my state of brutal honesty, it was clear that most of those visions would never materialize, at least in my experience. Rather than mourn the loss of those alternative futures, I rejoiced in my improved odds of finding a real future that would have the same net effect with far less waste and far more piece of mind. I also saw a potential gain: perhaps by giving away what I wasn't going to use, I could help someone else realize a similar vision without additional costs.

Several recent studies about climate sensitivity, and the feedback mechanisms that could spark an uncontrollable acceleration in global warming, convinced me there are only a handful of years left to avoid the worst case future for humanity and most other species. If we do what we need to, the infrastructure our lives currently depend upon will have been totally replaced with something far different within the next fifteen years, which makes any planning we do based on our current conditions effectively useless. I had naively been thinking about how to help survivors deal with the aftermath of what I saw as virtually certain failure, but now I've learned enough to see the worst case involves having no survivors. I've approached, accepted, then withdrawn from that conclusion several times over the past decade, but now that it is becoming more prominent in the projections of scientists based on new data, and time is running out, I have no choice but to stop waffling and deal with the consequences. This was the essence of my intellectual epiphany, that given my valuing of the survival and proliferation of life, the ultimate value of my life will be determined by what I do – or don't do – in the next four years; and of course I'm not alone in this. Beyond that time, we will either have a shot at a future with life in it, or we will be on a powerless glide path toward a world without us and most other species we have come to know.

How this critical time gets used, for me, has begun with making a set of decisions about my personal lifestyle and behavior based on the internalization of the lessons I've learned. What comes next is a work in progress.