An Apology for my Life: I Ain't out to Save the World

This little essay is a response to a comment a friend of mine made on Facebook, in which she said, 'Dale, who stirred it up down the commentary line, is well into his 70's and has the smallest carbon footprint of anyone I know. He is a constant reminder to me that these are small steps towards a bigger change in lifestyle, one that the millennial generation is experiencing.'

The commentary line had been about saving the world by not using Big Oil, about bicycling or walking as an alternative to driving cars, because cars are supposed to be causing global warming and the end of the world as we know it, and Big Oil leads to beheadings in the Middle East. I had pointed out that beheadings are an integral part of the culture and religion of the Middle East long before British Petroleum (See, for example, the Book of Judith), and that I didn't expect the world would end because of us, now matter how much hubris we had, but that cars would soon no longer need us and they might kill us off as unnecessary clutter.

What I want to make very clear is that I don't walk or ride a bicycle or live in a very small house because I want to save the world. I do those things because I enjoy having  few chores and because I like to experience the world. I have just about finished the construction of a tiny house--I still want to paint the now-white front door red--and I no longer have a kitchen. Cooking means one has more dishes to wash and general splatter to clean up.

I am well into my seventies, and the changes in my lifestyle since I had a Chrysler mini-van and a  Jeep Wagoneer and a golden retriever and a big tudor house where I hosted sit down dinner parties for thirty-two people have mostly been in small steps, and with each step I have found I enjoyed life more. I have never read Tom Robbins, but I find that the statement attributed to him, 'Life is too precious to waste on a career', applies to a lot of things besides careers. It's too precious to waste on car payments and spending hours each day in traffic jams, it's too precious to waste on mortgage payments, or on seeking the kind of approval that is most often the real goal of giving large parties. (Although I did for many years give very simple parties, just soup and bread and coffee, because I like to see what happens when groups of assorted people converse. Now I can see that happening on Twitter, without having to wash all those soup bowls.)

I'm not even convinced that the activities of us folk is the major cause of global warming, which has been going on since the last ice age. Certainly the world is getting warmer, but the global climate is a very complex system. One of the major motives for developing modern computers was an effort, starring John von Neumann, to make accurate weather predictions for the allied forces in World War II. The effort pretty much failed, at least in von Neumann's lifetime. I know, of course, that the majority of the world's climatologists agree that humans are the cause, but humans are a species prone to hubris, and the majority of the physicists a century ago thought Einstein was wrong. I have found Freeman Dyson's suspicions about our abilities to understand the complexities of climate more convincing than the folks who want to monetize our fears. I am well into my seventies, and I remember when the world was being destroyed by acid rain and when it was being destroyed by over population.

But if I did think that driving and other human activities were destroying the future viability of human life on this planet, and that human life on this planet was worth preserving, I would park my car and turn off my air-conditioner and watch Altered Carbon on my phone instead of my big-screen LG. And I would not  blame Big Oil for catering to my addictions. (I have found fewer more clashing ironies than the bumper stickers that flourished after the grounding of the Exxon Valdez saying 'Boycott Exxon', as if gasoline could be delivered by fairy moon dust and that ships had not had a very long history of wrecking.

Of course, heroic saviours have long been popular in the stories we tell ourselves, whether Jesus in a religion , or Arthur in romances, or Lucy in the Wardrobe, or Link in Hyrule or Neo in the Matrix. Joseph Campbell became rich and famous describing the Hero's Journey. I think it is probably important that we be the heroes/heroines/ of our own journeys. But when we think we are the heroes of every journey, that we are saving the world, well, I think I will skip the examples like Boney or American politics and just remember wise Puck in Midsummer's Night Dream. What fools we mortals be.