About 2525 & Greg

September, 2024

My goal is simple: Together, let's transform what appears to be an impossible task of saving the world into a lifelong adventure.

I want to focus together on what we need to do now to ensure humanity and our planet are thriving in 2525, some 500 years from now. I find the prospect of our species making it that far daunting to contemplate. But a 500-year perspective can be liberating: a long-range view enables envisioning the seismic changes that are needed, from healing our divisions to ending our emissions to abandoning our consumer culture for one focused on repairing the world. It won't happen this week–but couldn't we get there in five centuries?

Maybe. But on climate change we don't have 500 years; we may be out of time already. As we seem set to blow past so many tipping points, our efforts are highly likely to fail. Luckily, we haven't been able to compute the odds. But with odds so stacked against us, how can we inspire each other to give it everything we've got?

I'm writing to create and chronicle frameworks that can move us forward. I want to explore new ways to look at our political divisions. New priorities for reversing climate change. And a range of ideas for replacing our consumer culture.

A few things about me. I try to be modest, but I'll tell anyone who will listen that I deserve a gold medal in procrastination. After taking notes for a book on climate change for two years, I gave my first talk in 2015 (at a friend's house), decided I had something original to say, then disappeared to think and read about it for a decade. With temperatures rising, extinctions expanding, and tipping points tipping, you'd think I might have said something.

In that decade, often while commuting to visit my mother, I read and listened to as much as I could, much of it having nothing to do with climate change. One stepping stone was Adam Grant's Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. Later, I mistook Walter Isaacson's biography Da Vinci for a self help manual. Da Vinci worked out many things, including the outlines of the scientific method. He could have propelled humanity forward far sooner, if only he had published his notes. Instead, he kept experimenting, creating, and thinking. I have no pretensions to being smart, and no ideas as profound as the scientific method. But I took from the two books a license to slow down and think.

I kept silent because my thinking kept changing, and keeps evolving today. I watched as making the case for climate change being our most dire problem kept failing to win elections. I looked on as we slid closer and closer to fascism, attempting to assimilate what I was learning and rearrange the pieces. But the arrival of new perspectives no longer thwarts my desire to speak out. It's time.

I won't bother reciting my resume. Like everyone, I have zero qualifications for saving the world. Since nobody's ever done it before, we're all on equal footing: your ideas, your energy, your work, could be as important as anyone else's.

But I have baggage. I'm a white male boomer on the far left (one-time student and many-time publisher of Noam Chomsky among countless others, co-founder of a leftwing publishing house—you get the picture).

Two apolitical experiences continue to shape how I look at the world and my place in it. I helped take care of my dad as he was dying of ALS in 2001. In 2024, I completed nearly three years of caregiving for my mother, liberated by having the best sister in the world, who took over my duties. Prose is not the right form for me to express it clearly, but those experiences grounded me and altered my excessive optimism. (Incurable optimists take note: there's hope!)

I've lived in Trump country in rural Maine for over three decades, inspiring me to build bridges. (With a few guidelines, it's easy and can be fun, a topic I look forward to exploring). I have a passion for editing, reading, and writing. I cheer for underdogs, for looking at things differently.

For decades, I have gotten angry at injustices (maternal mortality, corporate power, hatred that some aim at seemingly everybody, innocent people on death row, military power used unjustly, racism, sexism, ageism, imperialism, transphobia, etc., etc., etc.), only to realize that my wellspring of anger parallels the righteous anger on the right. Some real or perceived slight crosses a line and bingo, we are off down the rabbit hole yelling, "Why can't our country even..." Or, "Why can't the human race even..."

There is power in our fury at transgressed principles. I want to write about how we can alter it to rearrange allegiances and change the world. And I want to propel a recently popularized idea: using joy as a productive fuel for change.

I have a spouse and two adult children, more reason than anyone should ever need to abandon paralyzing despair and focus on altering the course of our collective fate. Inspiration to publish my notes.

Other notes

Frequency: I have no idea at this point (September 2024).

Length: Not sure about this either, but guaranteed to vary.