Episode 104: Bill Ryerson On A Novel Approach To Population Education That Actually Works

Thanks for speaking out — and I’m always glad to be reminded of Alan Weisman’s writings — but I much question a return to hunter-gatherer lives — on simplest grounds that see us as the planet’s asteroid-blocker organism and I don’t feel right about abandoning that newfound role. Also, myself a kindness fanatic who also accepts plentiful violence in our world, I’m fascinated by the spontaneous limits against things like nukes or flamethrowers or city cremation bombing (as Dresden, Tokyo, etc.), limits so far accepted by Putin’s actions, whatever his words. I’m also dazzled by the bioscience of no-kill/lab-grown meats and veggie meat substitutes and the work of Temple Grandin to (semi-successfully) get world commercial slaughterers to soften the horrors of their daily “holocaust-on-nonhumans”. And I’m fascinated by the mercy of today never having to live thru smallpox or even guinea worm. And only smallest remnants of us practice human-sacrifice or witch-hunting or assassinating a Salman Rushdie and his publishers, altho there’s new outcroppings of human hideousness as new superstitions motivating arm-chopping upon albinos and new fads of mob lynchings by sadistic fiery “necklacing”. But Steven Pinker and MLK and Gandhi seem correct in seeing a recent historic slow drift toward mercy. And I suspect we re-kindle a lot of cruelty and helpless worship of cruel gods (the Aztecs, The Book Of Job, etc.) if we lurch backward to hunter-gatherer status (note such strange outcrops of primitive living as the murderous so-called “night runner” self-terrorizing customs of some East Africa tribal lives). And — oh yeah — I’m a 77-year-old facing eviction for turning my gov’t apartment into a live-in encyclopedia of reference materials on all this — while I push my aging brain cells to try saying this in ways digestible to average U.S. voters — so I keep saying get world “First Responder” systems of charitable mega-relief airlifts on-call within seconds and similar airlifts of arms for defending Ukraine and the next Ukraine (whether it’s Taiwan or Venezuela or whoever’s bullied next), and I’m totally trying to unlock the Rubic’s Cube of how to tell fellow humans that it’s now the time for peaceable war-size air fleets of massive “waterbombing” against Global Warming’s mega-wildfires and even dousing urban “heat-island” emergencies. So far, no interest from the giant herds of voters, the giant controllers of air fleets, the giant controllers of world charity, or anti-aggression militaries, or world search-and-rescue coordinators — but the possibilities stand open (and, oh yes, a research push equaling the 1940’s A-bomb projects could almost certainly give us bio-hydrogen power on all air fleets). Grim detail: we might naturally expect myself as impoverished, perhaps slightly autistic, mal-adept do-er of almost anything, to be failing at these outlier preachments — but it’s a worse alarm when I see an “abandonment syndrome” championed by multi U.S. Presidents abandoning allies, the Kremlin and Beijing leaning to abandoning sanity, a former Brit PM and present UN advisor ignored when trying to organize world pandemic vaccine deliveries — and I notice even brave celebrity Angelina Jolie backing off from her UN role and the elder statesmen now led by formidable Mary Robinson of the UN-based “The Elders” group never able to even back the aging Brit ex-PM’s world vaccine call — so the nicest thing I can say about this stagnant moment, I’ll say maybe it’s like when salmon swim in directionless circles waiting to re-adjust when passing between saltwater and freshwater. Problem: is the planet’s human mass waiting to pass into more kindness or cruelty or massively more chaos. I’ll dare bet 25 pennies on kindness — more than I’d bet on the darker two.

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