Live Well Before We Die

One of the more savage ironies of our impending extinction is that it could be prevented, and this prevention would bring to us more gains than losses. Yet we seem paralyzed by loss.

What would be lost, and what would be missed? I doubt that most people would miss fossil fuels. More would miss the personal car, for not even electric vehicles could justify the waste of metals and energy in their manufacture; high-speed rail has more justification. People would also miss -- for a while -- the consumer economy, the creation and illusory satisfaction of artificial needs. Finally, a few people would miss, intensely, capitalism: an economic system founded on perpetual expansion, perpetual assimilation, with no concern for human values, communities, or ecosystems. Any sustainable future will have to move beyond capitalism.


I suspect that most people would adapt well to economic systems that do not set wage labour and artificially-induced consumption above the ordinary needs of human beings. I suspect, as well, that personal transportation will not be missed for long in a world of trains and high-speed telecommunications.

For many, the most immediate gains would be a world of less pollution, of air, water, and soil that support the needs of life instead of the corporate need for passing the costs of production onto someone else.

Beyond these tangible gains, the biggest gain of all would be something absent in our modern world: hope and purpose.

Modern secular societies have passed the burden of meaning from churches and state institutions onto atomized human beings. For a few of us, this transition has meant greater personal freedom; for others, it has brought a crisis of meaning, a sense of emptiness and futility that we have tried to reduce with distractions of the pharmaceutical industry and of the corporate media. Living, as well, in a world on the brink of man-made destruction is a daily torture, with a psychological burden that would have horrified our ancestors.

Doing what we can to prevent mass extinction and to preserve human civilization would give us lives of meaning and of possibility, lives actually worth living. Even if our bravest, most visionary efforts failed us, we could at least live well before we died.