Learn how to Dwell Properly in a Submit-Collapse World: A Love Letter to My Kids and Grandchildren

If we’re trustworthy, most adults know we’re leaving a world for our youngsters and grandchildren that’s a lot much less fantastic than the world we grew up in. Turning 80 this yr, I take into consideration what knowledge I’d provide them.

I’m a rational scientist by coaching with a PhD in Worldwide Well being. So I had a troublesome time believing the imaginative and prescient I used to be given in the summertime of 1993 throughout a standard Native-American sweat lodge ceremony that was held throughout a Males’s Management Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana. I’ve written in regards to the imaginative and prescient and what I’ve realized in quite a lot of articles, principally just lately in April, 2023, “Transformations: The End of the U.S. and the World as We Know It and The Truth About Our Collective Future,” Part 1 and Part 2.

            What I used to be given within the imaginative and prescient was nothing lower than seeing the sinking of “The Ship of Civilization” with most individuals happening with the ship and additionally I noticed the “Lifeboats to the Future” captained by many people who acknowledged the truth of the sinking ship and had the braveness to attach with others and launch themselves into unknown waters to create a brand new, extra sustainable, lifestyle for humanity.

            My spouse, Carlin, and I’ve lived life throughout a interval that William R. Catton, Jr., writer of Overshoot: The Ecological Foundation of Revolutionary Change, calls the “Age of Exuberance” when it appeared, mistakenly, that we’d like not fear about limits to development and human ingenuity would clear up all our issues.

            In Catton’s e book, one of the crucial essential books I’ve learn that explains our current state of affairs and what we have to do now and sooner or later, he describes two paradigms. The primary, he says,

“is embedded in Western thoughtways by 400 years of exuberance that made the next assumptions believable and in style:

P1. Individuals are masters of their very own future; they’re primarily completely different from all different creatures, over which they’ve dominion.  

P2. Individuals can be taught to do something.

P3. Individuals can all the time change after they need to.

P4. Individuals can all the time enhance issues; the historical past of mankind is a historical past of progress; for

       each downside there’s a answer, and progress want by no means stop.”

Catton wrote Overshoot in 1980. Much more than forty years in the past, he acknowledged that over the earlier 4 hundred years, culminating with the invention of long-buried plant matter that could possibly be was fossil fuels, people had exceeded the carrying capability of our planet and had been headed for a crash. He didn’t blame anybody. He understood that folks with the most effective of intentions, set us on a path of ache and collapse that nobody had anticipated as a result of we didn’t perceive the ecological paradigm that people had adopted for the earlier two-million years of our ancestral historical past.

“The ecological paradigm,” says Catton, “clearly acknowledges the next primary concepts:

E1. Human beings are only one species amongst many species which are interdependently concerned in biotic communities.

E2. Human social life is formed by intricate linkages of trigger and impact (and suggestions) within the internet of nature, and due to these, purposive human actions have many unintended penalties.

E3. The world we reside in is finite, so there are potent bodily and organic limits constraining financial development, social progress, and different points of human residing.

E4. Nonetheless a lot the inventiveness of Dwelling sapiens or the ability of Homo colossus could appear for some time to transcend carrying capability limits, nature has the final phrase.”

You possibly can watch a wonderful interview with Dr. Catton recorded in 2008, seven years earlier than his loss of life at age 89. 

For My Kids, Grandchildren, Nice Grandchildren, and Future Generations

            I used to really feel responsible and ashamed that I couldn’t do extra to convey a few more healthy and safer world for future generations who I do know will reside in a world that can be far more difficult than the one I used to be blessed to reside in. However after studying William Catton’s evaluation, I now understand that all of us did the most effective we might, given what we knew.

            Whether or not we do it now or someday sooner or later, we have to reside inside the paradigm that’s primarily based on the ecological info of life. I hope you’ll be taught these concepts and put them into follow now, and perpetually. They’ve been, and can all the time be, a part of the proprietor’s handbook for human life on planet Earth.

            So, whereas I’m nonetheless right here in bodily type, I’ve a number of issues to say to my kids, grandchildren, and nice grandchildren: Jemal, Angela, Aaron, Dane, Evan, Antonia, Shelby, Jacob, Cody, Sierra, Hailey, Gunnar, Christian, Teanna, Deon, Derrick, Trey’Shawn, Matej, Natael, Nela, Jonovan, June, Flora, Naima, and people nonetheless to return.

As households get larger and the world will get extra difficult, we typically overlook that we’re a part of lengthy household lineage and on a day-to-day foundation we might not be conscious that we’re seen, acknowledged, and cherished, all of us want to recollect and remind ourselves of who we’re. Conventional Native American follow had us acknowledge and categorical our love within the selections we made seven generations into the long run. I hope my love for you’ll encourage you to share your individual love ahead.

• You might be particular and have presents and a novel calling to share throughout your lifetime.

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross stated,

“You are not a powerless speck of dust drifting around in the wind. We are, each of us, like beautiful snowflakes-unique, and born for a specific reason and purpose.”

All through your life, in case you are open to it, you’ll be taught extra about what you’re referred to as to contribute to the group of life through the time you might have on Earth.

After I was younger, my mom, quoting Shakespeare, informed me:

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

It’s by no means simple to know ourselves and to be true to the self we now have come to know. None of us exists individually from others and we’re all influenced by mother and father, associates, and the media who’ve their very own beliefs about what’s finest for us.

The comic and actress Lilly Tomlin stated,

“All my life I always wanted to be someone. I see now I should have been more specific.”

Certainly, there is no such thing as a one who will be you and you may’t be anybody else, so preserve going deeper to seek out and maintain quick to your individual genuine you.

• All of us reside in difficult instances and you should settle for the challenges of the time wherein you reside.

I used to be born in 1943. I nonetheless have vivid reminiscences of seeing information footage of the primary atom bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in August, 1945. I grew up with the worry of bombs dropped on us and the guilt of understanding what we had carried out to others.

Every of you has come into the world at a sure time in human historical past and every should cope with each private and social challenges of the instances wherein you reside. There isn’t a method to keep away from your time and place, so that you would possibly as effectively get to realize it, admire it, and have the braveness to be your finest self when you are right here.

• Acknowledge that each day, each second, is a blessing.

In elementary faculty, we acquired further credit score if we memorized the “saying of the week” and had been in a position to converse it outload when referred to as upon. I nonetheless keep in mind this one,

“Lost between the hours of sunrise and sunset, two golden minutes, each set with sixty diamond seconds. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.”

Even after I was younger I felt that being alive was an ideal reward and I by no means took life without any consideration. As I become old, I’m awed by the thriller of life and need to style and expertise all that has to supply me for so long as I’m right here.  

After we come into the world, we’re depending on others. Hopefully you might have had adequate caregivers. These of you who’re mother and father or will turn out to be mother and father, know that you’ll all the time fall wanting being the mother and father you hoped to be. None of us are excellent. We do the most effective we are able to.

There may be knowledge within the directions given on airplanes that if there’s a lack of cabin strain, oxygen masks will drop down. You’ll want to place your individual masks on first earlier than attempting to assist others. Too typically, we turn out to be so centered on serving to others, we don’t maintain ourselves. All the time be good to your self. Care for you, and once you overlook, deal with your self like your most valuable little one.

After I was rising up we walked all over the place and most all the things that was essential—the movie show the place we went each Saturday, the river the place we caught crawdads in the summertime, our associates’ homes—was inside strolling distance. Now most of us reside in cities and most of what we’d like will not be near residence.

People have walked for tens of millions of years. Strolling continues to be good for us. I consider it’s nature’s always-available anti-depressant and stress reliever. It additionally connects us to the Earth. I nonetheless stroll each day and I’m glad I fashioned the behavior younger. Wherever you reside, discover a method to stroll.

• Do one thing for another person right this moment.

There’s a saying in my Jewish custom:

“If I’m not for myself, who will be? If I am for myself only, what am I? If not now, when?”

I’ve discovered over time that these will not be actually separate acts. One of many issues that makes me really feel finest about myself, significantly after I really feel depressed and unloved, is to do one thing good for another person. It doesn’t need to be one thing massive—a caring smile, a hug, a flower—could make me really feel good and assist another person on the identical time.

It’s simple to assume, I’ll do it tomorrow, but when not now, when? We by no means know when it is likely to be our final day.

When issues turn out to be harassed on the earth, and so they actually are actually, and it’s more likely to proceed, there’s a tendency to really feel that others are being “mean” and are in charge for the various issues in our lives. We will react to harsh phrases, indifference, aggression, or violence, with extra of the identical. Or we are able to remind ourselves that others are hurting and the one method to scale back meanness on the earth, is so as to add extra kindness.

Dr. Gerald Jampolsky was pal of ours. He wrote the e book, Love is Letting Go of Worry. He stated,

“When we think we have been hurt by someone in the past, we build up defenses to protect ourselves from being hurt in the future. So the fearful past causes a fearful future and the past and future become one. We cannot love when we feel fear…. When we release the fearful past and forgive everyone, we will experience total love and oneness with all.”

There may be extra I wish to share, however that’s all for right this moment. I stay up for your responses. What would possibly you add to this record? Come go to me at MenAlive.com and in case you are so moved be a part of our Moonshot for Mankind.