Answer To A Friend

Q: Do you still live in Springfield and work with that "green peace" outfit?

A: I am fascinated by the memory lapses people have, especially smart people. I am not sure which of my activities got put in the "green peace" category, but if you do not mean the organization Green Peace, which I do not belong to and have never mentioned, then perhaps you would consider my activities as pulling for something that can be called "green peace". Am I correct to sense a certain derogation? Truthfully, I cannot fathom any animosity toward a movement that seeks to preserve the capacity of the earth to support life, since humanity is a form of life and needs "green peace" to survive. The arguments, as I hear them, merely pit short term personal or national survival and wealth against long term universal survival, and I fail to grasp how smart people can be so shortsighted.

You are of interest to me too, as in my mind, and please correct me and forgive me if I am wrong, you are a representative of those interests, of those who esteem the security of wealth more highly than the security of life, who construe security in terms of defenses against hostile parties, and disdain any notion of security that might result from a better distribution of power and wealth. If this is so, if your stands on these issues can be characterized this way, why would you have any interest in me? Our politics are contra-polar. Do you like me despite my politics, and cope with the dissonance by ignoring my arguments or condescending to them? Or perhaps you might like to help me get more interested in that productive work which would advance my personal prosperity - hence distracting me from my politics - , or see me as a son-like figure who - and this is true - could use a father figure to push him in positive directions. I am spinning the fibers of likelihood borne to me by subjective evidence, by inference, not by facts or admission. I wonder if perhaps you actually enjoy the dissonance enough to tolerate the politics, or enjoy my intelligence enough to tolerate the dissonance. I wonder if you would be happier if I suddenly had an awakening, to be reborn into the fold of free-marketeers. I am puzzling over these things and I am happy that you have taken enough interest in me to wend your way across the mine field of my personality. You even dared to ask me about "green peace"! I admire you for that.

Well, being not a possessor of wealth, I have only the more primal vested interest, to create and preserve that environment in which any person can find something to do to self-maintain. In fact, I am so low on the totem pole that I cannot even aspire to personal wealth - my well being depends on the well being of those around me. So not having wealth, the stability of the economy and political environment is important to me for a different set of reasons - and possesses a different look. I am not looking for good locks and a working class that carries the yoke of its labors with docility. I am not seeking a social culture which esteems the ossification of those systems that control wealth while liberating the possessors of wealth to pursue more. Nor am I interested in piping wealth from those who have it to those who do not. My aspiration is for a flexible dynamic system that is sustainable over imaginable time, whose science can say "within our powers of prediction, Earth can support life for indefinite time." (This is not currently true. Within our powers of prediction, Earth's life support systems could fail, and humanity would be the cause of those failures.) My aspiration is for a human social-cultural system that dynamically readjusts to changing conditions and opportunities, and values the health and opportunity for self-maintenance of all systems of life. My aspiration is to make human activity consonant with the sustainability of Earth's life support systems through self-aware, self-adjusting social-cultural processes. I wish for humanity to accept the task of maintaining Earth's life support systems, such as planetary homeostatic mechanisms that keep ozone in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and ecosystems and habitats that maintain particular species of plants and animals, through integration of these values by social-cultural systems, with a minimum of applied police power. Stated as succinctly as I possibly can, I believe that only a full blown ecology of economic activity, in which personal freedom operates responsibly, is sustainable over indefinite time, and to be sustainable over indefinite time, that economic ecology must integrate the values of maintaining Earth's life support systems. This is the bare minimum for me. Anything short of this trends humanity and life toward self-annihilation. My personal well being is of course important to me, but I do not place it outside of the well-being of others, or the well-being of the Earth's own systems. That other people do is unfathomable to me.

Well, none of this has anything necessary to do with you. I have simply used you as a catalyst for plumbing my own feelings about the world and my place in it. So to answer your question, I don't know which "green peace" advocates you mean, but I can assure you that I continue to work for "green peace". I am currently occupied by a responsibility to coordinate production of a series of workshops for Solarfest, an organization that promotes sustainability awareness.