Words that really struck me recently are from a newer, much shorter novel by the author of The Overstory, Richard Powers. In Bewilderment (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), Powers tells us a story about an astrobiologist and his son, who are looking for evidence of life in the universe.
Oh, this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good,
as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil,
the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world
that by every calculation ought never to have been.
I like this paragraph because it gives a different context to the endless troubles we’re facing these days. We’ve messed up, and still, this planet is amazing. Even people are amazing.
Facing our mess-ups, the question is always, “What can we do?” However, the real question is, will we do it? One of my favorite slogans is true: there are solutions. We’d be in much better shape, in our personal lives as well as in the life of the planet, if we did the solutions we already know we need to do.
Each day it seems we’re faced with judgment calls, when we need to make decisions and there are no great choices in front of us. As one small example, I have made a commitment — to myself — to send out one blog a month. Next month will complete three full years since October 2019.
This August morning, my answer to a question I often consider — “What do we want? Good excuses, or good lives?” — was that maybe I should settle for good excuses this time, and not send out a monthly blog. After all, a couple days ago I tested positive for Covid, though it’s very mild, plus I still need to do some fundraising to pay for the Controller 2022 campaign expenses, and and and and. But I had already started to think of what I hoped to say in a blog, so in the end I opted to write the blog, and do what I said I was going to do, which is one big part of a good life, eh?
Other decisions we face have broader effects, and they also have the quality of giving us no solidly wonderful choices. Right now, the Green Party of California is studying the ballot initiatives that we’ll vote on in November. The initiatives are almost never what they should be — they have some good parts with a bunch of bad stuff thrown in — and so it’s hard to support them, even when we want the decent parts (crumbs?) that they offer.
Two concepts that come up in political discussions are “reform” and “revolution.” Do we go for “mere reform” or do we reject reforms and push for “real revolution?” I believe many of the political folks I hang around with agree that there are significant reforms — in areas like healthcare, housing, education, justice, and meaningful work — that would empower us to make the revolutionary changes we need — like “People, Planet, and Peace over Profit.”
I like a revolutionary quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. from more than 50 years ago, and I’ll bet that if he were alive in the 2020s he would specifically address the climate. He said, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Here’s to our health, people and planet!