One of the most annoying things about Blake’s dying days (https://115journals.com/2021/02/11/learning-to-die-4-practicum/) was that he wouldn’t stop giving loud diatribes about how we had to change the world’s economy a.s.a.p. We had to pay each human being a living wage and not depend on capitalism to trickle one down. In other words, choose Bernie Sanders as a candidate. Elect Bernie Sanders. While we – his children and I, his ex-wife – were desperately trying to achieve a level of sanitation in his home that would avoid charges of elder abuse, he was reforming economics for future generations. He wasn’t wrong. He was just very distracting. His job, in our minds, was to leave, to end his unbearable pain and weekly emergencies when it overwhelmed him. But he was steadfast. If anyone ever comes back, reincarnated, it will be Blake. And maybe Bernie Sanders.

Blake was forming a new philosophy, a humanistic way to deal with our evolving world.

Roy Stanton describes the argument of his book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: we have failed to manage global warming and capitalist civilization is already over. “But that humanity can survive and adapt if we accept human limits and transience as fundamental truths and work to nourish the variety and richness of our cultural heritage.” He goes on to clarify that learning to die as an individual means letting go of our predispositions and fears, while learning to die as a civilization means letting go of a way of life and its ideas of identity, freedom, success and progress.(24 in e-book)

Blake and I were the first of our working class family to go to university. We became high school teachers. We had worked our butts off to get there, but we assumed life would be like that from now on. We would do better than our parents. We bought our starter house in our late twenties. I went back to teaching because we needed the money. For a few years, maybe 8, we had a comfortable life with a pool, a sail boat and long trips to Europe. When we split up, Blake still had the boat and the Corvette. As the economy ebbed and flowed, I gave up owning. I rent. I lease. I shop at Walmart. Blake left a house worth nearly a million and an old sail boat that I had to give away. I settled his debts and divided the remaining $400,000 among the 3 children. One of them settled her debts.

Yes, there is a disaffected class of those who slipped down. I am not one of the slipping disaffected set. I may have nothing but I have a pension. I am disaffected because I thought that morally and spiritually we were evolving. Then along came the U.S. election of 2016. The pandemic was more of a scientific failure until it changed into a contest between those who were caring and dying and those others. The latter are still advocating the moon is made of green cheese.

Stanton quotes German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, “It is a characteristic of being human that human beings are presented with tasks too difficult for them without having the ability of avoiding them because of their difficulty.”

On a personal and less universally significant level, I once became allergic to almost every food and most of my environment. My condition baffled doctors and limited my life so that I became increasingly weak. I ended up having to have an oxygen tank for severe episodes. It became clear to me that I had to find my own way out. First I began walking around the block. I did that repeatedly until I could walk around two blocks. Then I adopted a macrobiotic diet. I had gained enough strength to be able to cook a pot of brown rice and steam vegetables like seaweed and kale, which I had not eaten previously. Once I was able to return to work, I continued walking for half of my lunch break and for several years I continued the macrobiotic way of eating. Very gradually, without ever having been diagnosed, my condition improved until I more or less back to normal. I remember clearly that when I first began walking, I felt that it was an unsolvable problem, which I had to solve.

Stanton outlines the evolution of the human race starting in Africa 200,000 years ago when average temperatures were 61 degrees F., 3.5 degrees F. lower than now and went even lower. At 135,000 years ago, average temperatures increased +5 F, leading Cromagnum humanoids to flee to more temperate regions. Fifty thousand to 10,000 years ago there was a cultural explosion in the Euphrates valley – cultivating, herding, as well as hunting and gathering went on in the villages, which grew into great cities like Uruk. This civilization ended with a 300-year drought. Five thousand years ago, a series of other civilizations – Greek, Roman, Tang, Mongolian and our own arose.

Human civilization thrived in the Halocene period, the most stable environment in the last 650,000 years. Carbon has ended it.

Because my early life was lived in remote hill country, it was still based mostly on biomass energy. We had no electricity, telephone or indoor plumbing. We did have kerosene lamps, although we still remembered how to make tallow candles. We could hear the hoot of the steam engine across the woods and from time to time a gas-fueled vehicle appeared if the dirt roads were passable. As an adult, I got used to thinking my past was unusual until an immigrant pointed out to me, as he wired my cable, that it was like his own and many other immigrants’ who had come from the middle east.

Stanton considers the possible solutions to global warming that is cutting back carbon emissions. One of the problems of managing the electrical grid is that electricity has to be produced at the moment it is needed. In the week I am writing this, we have seen black outs in southern states, such as Texas, brought about by extremely cold temperatures and correspondingly high demands on the system. These were compounded by the fact that Texas has opted not to link to the federal grid to avoid federal regulations. The governor tried to convince us it was the entirely the failure of solar and wind power. In fact wind power here in Canada is not affected by cold because it’s engineered that way. Texas fired most of its power by natural gas anyway.

One by one, the author deals with possible strategies – sequestering carbon dioxide, nuclear fission, carbon tax, cap and trade, a sulfur blanket in the stratosphere. Grid managers are reluctant to go above 27% of production by wind and sun, since they are variable with the weather, complicating the other variable, demand. The other strategies are either too expensive, potentially harmful – burying nuclear waste, sulfur blanket, impossible to implement as one and in a timely manner. The problem requires the global community made possible by carbon energy to act as one, but economic fallout prevents action.

“The problem is that the problem is too big. The problem is that different people want different things. The problem is that nobody has real answers. The problem is us.” (68)

Another post will follow, reflecting on the second half of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene

See 115journals.com for previous posts sharing the title Learning to Die