My blog is dedicated to the book Ishmael, which completely changed my life. The book is the inspiration and the underlying guide for my writings.
In 1991, Ted Turner offered a $500,000 prize for a book offering the most creative solutions for solving world problems. Ishmael, written by Daniel Quinn, was chosen among 2,500 entries. It was selected by a celebrity panel that included the famous sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. The novel was published the following year.
To sum up the book, agriculture is what radically changed humanity. Suddenly, we had some control over nature, instead of nature always controlling us. It was just 12,000 years ago when agriculture began in the Middle East, which is a blink of an eye compared to the millions of years it took us to evolve into humans.
Once agriculture was established, human development took off at a rapid pace. Within a few hundred years, we became the controllers of the Earth, but our technology has always developed faster than our wisdom and maturity.
Fast forward to the 21st century and we are a civilization that's destroying it's own habitat through overpopulation, pollution, and climate change. I believe we are now headed to global catastrophe.
But it doesn't HAVE to be that way. We don't HAVE to pollute the oceans and air. We don't HAVE to fill the skies with carbon.
An underlying theme of Quinn's book is the need for conquest and control. I see these same characteristics manifesting themselves today in the form of greed and selfishness. I believe these are learned traits. We don't HAVE to have an economic system that is driven by selfishness and greed, and one that exploits the natural world for quick profit. We CAN change how we live.
“You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live... I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity... This is what prevents them: They're unable to find the bars of the cage.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
My Slow Conversion
In 1997 I resigned my leadership role in a church and began my journey. I soon found a community of like-minded friends in the Sierra Club. The Club had a ListServ system where you could have discussions on a particular topic with colleagues from around the country. Through these on-line forums I met a woman in Houston, Texas who became one of my early mentors. She regularly quoted Ishmael to me, although it was another few years before I finally read the book.
In 2004 I was amazed to find out that there was an Ishmael study group in Atlanta. I was invited to a meeting by a Sierra Club member from another local group, who knew about my interest in human overpopulation. I then became a member of the group, which lasted another five years before fizzling out. During this time I made several close friends, who I still stay in touch with today.
There is a passage in the book that encourages the reader to "spread the word," and I've given many copies of Ishmael to my environmental colleagues over the years. I always keep an extra copy on hand, so if you would like to read the book please contact me and I'll mail it to you.
A Look At Today
I envision a world where spiritual values are held in higher regard than material goods. I want a world where we live in relative peace and exist in a way that does not harm the Earth or other animals species. We should minimize meat intake, since commercial meat production is one of the most destructive industries on the Planet. We need to convert our vehicles and homes to all-electric. Most importantly, we must have small families and learn to be happy with less. The love and obsession with wealth, at any cost, is sending humanity down a bad path. Everyone wants it, but it's the super rich that hordes and controls it, and manipulates the working class to do their bidding by screaming "jobs" -- jobs that rarely materialize as promised and are usually low-paying service sector jobs.
Our current political and economic systems need a complete reengineering. Our values need to change. And most importantly, we need to show more wisdom and help the underclasses, wildlife, and Earth, rather than exploiting them.
