Tell Me a Better Story

The magnitude of the changes sweeping our world require a certain restraint from a writer like me. It would be easy to magnify some of these developments to the point where a reader could easily conclude that I think humanity has never before faced such challenges.

I don't.

We have.

Although many of the current crises -- especially human-caused climate change -- are most likely unprecedented since we evolved into something resembling our current state, so too is our collective scientific knowledge and technological capacity to rectify our errors.

I've never subscribed to the school that humanity's collective future is hopeless. We can and we will survive, if that is our top priority.

In order to do so, however, many of the current values in my country need to undergo a radical change. The selfishness of not only the rich but the aspiring rich is nauseating.

We need balance. We need reason. We need modest desires -- our children and grandchildren growing up with good health and happiness. Our ability feed ourselves returned to some sort of local, organic, socially-just system that rewards farmers and consumers in proper proportions.

Much of what many of us currently do can easily be done away with. Let go. Much of our overbuilt housing stock, our over-sized vehicles, and our unjust level of resource consumption should burst just like the bubble that was the sub-prime mortgage bubble.

We can be better than that. Many of us yearn for a better life, not necessarily a richer life, but one with more meaning and one better grounded in the reality of our ecological relationship with the earth.

If what I describe sounds like a "back to the land" hippie of the '70s, know that I never was that kind of person and I still am not. I'm a city-dweller, an activist, a man who works more hours every day than most people a third of my age.

I'm a writer. What I most yearn for now is a story of our people worth celebrating.

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