Menacingly In Green Depths

I've named this post after my most recent novel – now called, Something for Nothing. It deals with a submarine disaster and in general with themes around the idea of surfaces. This post is meant to ask you to take a dive of sorts. I recently was led to this post at ClimateProgress.org. I urge you to read it and then continue down through the comments. This will feel like a very deep dive indeed.

This isn't a unique  experience to this post, this site; but I've found it useful – they've also managed to avoid the usual Troll-fest of crazies and deniers such posts attract. What you'll find for the most part are thoughtful, intelligent people who've already come a certain way along the path from the blissful naiveté promoted and maintained by the visible and noisy outer culture. They are reacting in varied ways, many trying to maintain their belief in techno-solutions even in the face of overwhelming evidence these will not help.

To be clear, I'm not staking anything on the specific claims in that post. If you want to deny and lash out, go elsewhere. Enjoy a smug satisfaction that I'm just another patsy for whatever conspiracy you prefer, and move on.

If we on Earth were facing a "death of a thousand cuts," this particular threat is one of millions not thousands that are accumulating as we dither. It's not whether this particular threat will play out at some predicted level, but the overall predicament that is important. What's so good about this post and its comment thread is watching the way the realization of what we face sinks in and seeing how people react. There is hope in the stillness, in an openness to question the edifice of inanity that captures most of our public attention.

This is an example of a dive we all need to take, to get past our terrified aversion to look at what's going on around us and begin to take in what's at stake. I'm devoting my energies to finding how to do this without our being crushed by the pressure. I want to help find ways to combat the "Bends" that threaten us as we try to come up from these deep dives. There is a space between blissful ignorance and bottomless despair. In this space we can make a life, even in the face of such enormity.