Hope

I remain hopeful because I know that healthy people will ultimately discover that the deepest joy comes through voluntarily serving the needs of others. Gratitude for having our needs met makes us happy. Happy people don’t need enemies. They learn that the easiest way to eliminate an enemy is to make him a friend. Friends serve each others’ needs and the joy grows until it encompasses us all. As Dr King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Simple logic dictates that we all need a healthy environment. The ecosphere of which we are a small component naturally seeks to diversify life within a mutually beneficial symbiotic system that establishes its own homeostasis, generally making incremental adjustments toward the good of all. When the balance is upset, as it has been by humanity’s gross overconsumption for the last couple of centuries, the adjustments become increasingly radical. While nature would prefer to heal its cancerous tumor, it will if necessary excise us. Catastrophic climate change and the sixth great extinction are existential threats to our species. Correcting our course must be done rapidly, because the results will be slow to appear. Adjusting the planetary climate is a bit like steering the Titanic. Currently, we’re still turning the wheel toward the iceberg. This won’t end well. If humanity manages to survive another century, I predict our total population will stabilize around one half of one billion people, the approximate number of us the last time we were consuming natural resources slower than nature produced them. Whatever our total number each of us will need to live relatively simple lives - reduce, reuse, and recycle - sharing durable, flexible tools and limiting our reproduction to replacement levels. We can hope that voluntary population slowing will reduce the necessity of mass die-offs. We needn’t be complete Luddites nor miserable primitives. Modern communication is a wonderful thing if it can be directed toward meeting human needs rather than fueling short term greed. The global village utilizing biomimicry to fit in rather than dominate is a worthy vision. We can each learn to grow our own food, pedal our own bikes, and care for our neighbors. I’ve been inspired by permaculture food forests which I’ve visited. These lush groves provide more nutrients per hectare than any industrial methods, but their diversity makes them harder to exploit for short term profits than monoculture. We have the knowledge to grow food forests wherever people can live. We should dedicate as much land, public and private, toward food forests as soon as we can. Besides ending hunger, food forests sequester excess atmospheric carbon into the soil and help to mitigate catastrophic climate change. Sometimes all that one person can do is to survive. That in itself is a success. As of this writing, I'm proud to have survived 25,397 days. Each day is another opportunity for healing. Build upon it by practicing empathy will those around you. Few things will improve our health more than singing and dancing with our community.