What? Yet another excuse for Lou to climb on his soap box and prattle on about private activism and how our choices can reduce our resource consumption and CO2 production, and also send market signals? No, not this time, although I’m sure you won’t have to wait too long before I come back to that particular hot button with a cartoonishly large mallet and start wailing away at it yet again.
This time I’m talking about a higher level of abstraction and in a more philosophical way; not how you spend your money, but how you spend yourself.
I’ve mentioned many times how inspiring it is to be around all the kids in my neighborhood or to visit with our three nieces, two of which are college sophomores, and the third is a senior in high school just making a final decision on a college. Yes, I know, it’s the oldest cliche in the toolbox of any would be do-gooder: It’s all about the kids. The nasty problem with cliches is that they tend to become cliches by being true in the first place. For me it really is all about our kids (and as I say in my Oil Crunch presentation, they’re all our kids, whether they share our DNA or not). If those of us alive today were the last ones ever to be born, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about peak oil or global warming or any of it. In a matter of decades human beings would be gone, and nature would take back the planet and begin to erase the evidence of our existence. Nothing we could do would alter that significantly.
But it’s not that simple. We do have all these kids to worry about and to whom we owe much more than we’re delivering (as in a more livable world), and we’ve painted ourselves into one hell of a tight, ugly corner, thanks to the serial horrors triggered by global warming, plus the added joy of the one-two punch of peak oil and peak natural gas. (Yes, I’m intentionally ignoring other peaks we could drag onto stage here; those I’ve mentioned are more than enough for my taste.)
And all this means what, exactly? It means that every one of us has to make a fundamental decision about our own life: How will we spend our one token, our one trip on this planet? Will we happily put on the drone’s blinders, worry about nothing of more substance than where we can get the best price on beer or which politician is promising the lowest taxes? Will we choose to wallow in a toxic stew of our own ignorance and arrogance, deride those who seek to understand the world and make it a better (or simply less bad) place? Or will we choose to act like thoughtful, caring, even, dare I say it, loving adults, and do everything we can to give all our children a cleaner, more sustainable world, one governed by compassion for others?
How will we choose to spend ourselves?
And if we choose the high, and difficult, road, what are we each willing to do to follow that path? What sacrifices of time and money and ego and effort will we make in order to transform ourselves, in this whisper of time we’re alive, to pursue those higher goals?
For each of us, the answer is different, of course, which is how it should be. The right answer for me or any of you dear readers who come to this site so often shouldn’t be imposed on anyone else. But as a practical matter, some of the collective decisions we make do impose the will of the majority on the minority, and sometimes what’s best for humanity in the long run is militantly opposed by a minority with a financial or ideological interest to do so. Such is the nature of humanity, I suppose–there are always battles within battles, and hidden agendas virtually never remain completely hidden in the long run.
All of which reminds me of something I rarely mention on this site. I became convinced years ago that I know the answer to one of “the” questions: What is the meaning of life. The answer is simply that it’s a trick question. The meaning of life isn’t a single, universal constant carved in the sky by the finger of God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whomever. The meaning of life is defined by each of us. For the person who’s dedicated his life to being a NASCAR fan, that’s where it begins and ends, whether or not he thinks of it in such terms, at least until he changes his mind. Others among us have distinctly different views of the universe and our role in it, to put it mildly, but that’s our choice.
So what’s the freakin’ point? Simple: I’m literally begging you, every single one of you who normally read this site or get a link to this post from someone in e-mail, to stop what you’re doing, sit in a quiet room for ten minutes and think about how you’re spending yourself. The worst thing we can do is engage in mindless consumption, whether it’s of goods or services or most especially ourselves. I’m pleading with you to reject that impulse, lead an examined life, and engage in mindful consumption at all levels. Read everything your time allows on energy and environmental issues, think, engage with others, and then act.
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December 29th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
I don’t have a problem with the message for this post, over all, but I do have a problem with the idea of ‘the children are our future’. I think we’ve gotten horribly lost along the way with this message and as a result it has caused a lot of the disaster we’re facing today. The overwhelming cause of overuse, rampant consumerism and resource depletion is overpopulation. Anyone claiming we can continue to reproduce at the rates we have been and also feed ourselves is CLEARLY selling something. The problem is that the constant focus on the children has gone sideways into the idea that we must do everything to have children, maintain children and make them happy at any and all costs. We have a society that is positively neurotic about children.
If we really want to make children of utmost importance and make the future most livable for future generations then start having less children. Confine the world’s population to 1 child per woman, forever. As the population drops the resource conflicts will decrease as the available resources per person grows. Living space pressures will drop and the negative impact the stampeding herd of humans has on the planet will lessen. It’s been stated over and over that we are in massive overshoot for our species given the available resources of the planet. We can choose to take some fairly draconian reproductive measures now and ensure that each and every child is given the utmost care and consideration. Let’s focus our efforts into better and more efficient contraception with fewer un-wieldly side effects. Make it possible for men and women to more easily take equal parts in the contraceptive effort.
Right now, there are 1 million new people added to the planet every few days. I wonder how many of those children are actually wanted and how many are going to abandoned, abused, unwanted, unfed, unloved? If you really want to help children then you help the most by getting people to stop having them accidentally and w/o a thought to the longer term.
-sv
December 29th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
SV, The population question is harder than just one child per woman. If life expectancy continue to grow, and infant mortality keeps declining, it will require less than one per woman. If it does reduce resource wars, that will complicate the equation further. Population is an important part of the question, and I do not mean to make light of that. I am living my life as I would want to do for those children I have helped raise, and for each of the others I have truly known. BTW, I was involved in the Zero Population Growth organization in Dallas in the middle 70’s.
Lou, I have thought of the alternatives, and changed my life several years ago. I appreciate your thoughts like this short one. It strikes me as applied philosophy.
December 30th, 2007 at 5:31 am
Good post. Thanks for the reminder. I will do exactly what you said.
December 30th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Excellent post. These are thoughts I often have at this time of year. Several seasons back, the members of my family declared a moratorium on holiday presents (with some slack cut for small children); the only ones allowed are deeds (doing something nice for somebody)or charitable contributions in a family member’s name. It’s just a tiny step, but our holidays are a lot more relaxed and we’re not burning up gasoline racing around to all the local malls buying presents.
December 31st, 2007 at 2:20 pm
I do have a sort of a cause to which I am devoting what time and energy I can, something I believe in, that can improve the world in a modest way if it succeeds. It’s not environmental, though, it’s a computer security technology. Oh, well, we each contribute in those ways to which we are best suited.
As far as the children being our future, I have a slightly different perspective. I agree with the basic concept, but at the same time I look at the historical record to see how things have changed with each generation. The truth is that for the last few hundred years, things have gotten better and better. Each generation has been healthier, longer lived, wealthier, with more options, more choices, and more freedom.
Now, it’s possible that this trend will reverse itself, with global warming and resource limitations. But I wouldn’t count on it.
Ultimately, humanity is our greatest resource, and human knowledge and ingenuity is going to continue to play the largest role in the shape of the future. I believe that our children will have far better lives than we have, and that the trend will continue for a better and more perfect world for each future generation.