That I may live to be 97 years old should not surprise me. All my recent ancestors I know of minimally lived into their 90s. My mother’s mother lived to 96 and two of her older sisters both lived to 106. As a child I recall grandma, who lived with us, having some odd words in her vocabulary learned in the Appalachian hills of West Virginie.

As a young pedant, I determined the words were Elizabethan English, which tells me when my/her people arrived in the area. One great grandad had a country store. I inherited the special pliers he used to pull teeth. He was also likely the closest thing to a doctor in the area. For 400 years, I’m guessing, childhood mortality was at least 50%, hence there was a cleansing of the family gene pool, but for which I would not have saved the world.

And how do I know I wrote a story about how I saved the world? Well, I don’t. I do have random access to Wikipedia as it appears to exist in the future. The latest entry/date is from June 2353. The device I found appears to be of alien manufacture (I call it the WayForward Machine — WFM). For some reason, it only works for a few hours once a year.

It had never occurred to me to search for someone born in 1953 by whatever name I may come to be known by. I prefer learning about the future’s recent past, i.e. the next 329 years. But I found references to someone about my age called Mooper Dude.

The last time I was on the WFM I was reading more about the Mooper Dude, who had saved the world per some sources, and following one of the 143 references I found speculation that the Mooper’s real name was Eric Lee.

The Dude developed something of a cult following and in 2050 the Dude had written an essay about how he had saved the world, not the Suave Ones who claimed they had (at the time, they were busy writing revisionist history that had allegedly been proven wrong by 2353 when everyone believed in the Dude’s version — but what could I know?) .

Okay, so I found and read the WFM entry on the Dude’s essay. As most Wikipedia entries are, it is way too long — too many cooks, and so I’ll summarize. Of interest is that, up to 2024, everything the Dude claims is as I remember.

As for the next 26 years, I suppose I’ll “believe it” when I live it, but probably not (my future may be influenced by the story, but it cannot determine my future).

The next time I have access to the WFM, I could find out when/how the Dude died, but I don’t believe anything I read on Wikipedia now, so why should I believe claims made by a machine I found while making crop circles? [And sorry about that, joining the Crop Circles Guild and making crop circles in my travels is the only thing I can regret doing, as so many people were fooled — I must feel bad about that.]

Wiki claims don’t always check out now, but most other sources (e.g. all social media) are not worth reading, so 99% of the prattle (tavern talk to MSM) doesn’t even merit being known of, to then not believe it. I don’t remember when I stopped reading Scientific America (after it went over to the dark side to become a pop-sci rag for experts), but some journals are still trying.

Death can come at any time, and someone could have used my obscure life as a starting point in creating a fictitious person (who allegedly saved the world), so they could command and control humans as usual (and save the empire, see history 101 — JC Superstar). But for those who are easily amused, I’ll share the Mooper’s story.

He had been born an idiot, skipped kindergarten, and when tested by the local school, his mother was told he was functionally “too immature” to start first grade, but he was put in school anyway (mother knows best).

He had no memory of his first two years in school (traumatic amnesia), and made his first friend at the start of third grade in a new school (who asked about the school he had been going to, and all he could remember was it was a light green color on the outside).

He was assessed to be uneducable, and so was on the receiving end of the then policy of “social promotion” to prevent the harm of pointlessly failing a student and having them repeat a grade level (at public expense). He never did homework nor asked questions (he had noted it annoyed the adults, so he stopped). He couldn’t follow what teachers were saying, so he stopped trying.

In his senior year of high school, the Dude became extremely discombobulated by evidence he was not an idiot, but he was the only one aware of the evidence (apart from one teacher). After the last day of his public schooling, he didn’t go to do the graduation thing. He decided to be a lifelong learner and never graduate.

He bought a bus ticket to the US desert southwest (to Flagstaff, he was too terrified to walk alone to the Wichita city limits and hitchhike). Once out of the Arizona bus station, he had no choice but to find a road and hold his thumb out. It was 1970. It was common, almost normal, to do this. He ended up doing migrant farm work summers for the next ten years.

He had built a box on the back of a $200 1954 Ford pickup to live in when not on the road, and for three years took classes at a small (very inexpensive) community college. Then he wondered, why bother? Why not feed directly from the trough (a bigger one) for free?

So he moved to live in the student ghetto just outside UCSB (University of California Santa Barbara) where he spent his days (and nights until 11pm when the library closed) mostly wandering the open stacks for books to read.

Seven years passed. His summers on the road (he added hopping freight trains to his free transportation options) was the needed correction to too many books. He was a fool-errant.

One story of Dude (which is as I recall) is that he once was in the bookstore in Isla Vista and needed to ask the staff a question, but couldn’t — he had lost his voice from disuse (usually his lips don’t even move when he reads).

One fine year he was on his way back to California from picking apples in Washington near the Canadian border. He was watching the Oregon countryside pass, sitting in front of the open boxcar doors. The possibility occurred to him that if he became an agronomist, an “expert,” he could travel to other countries, as another tramp had prior to 1896, to go observin’ matters till he died.

He had never joined the other tramps after payday to spend his money on booze and whores. He just took to the road, and to never be afraid of being jack-rolled for his money, he would buy a money order and mail it to his parents. He had saved up enough to pay his way through three years and two degrees (crop and soil science) at CalPoly, a state land-grant university.

He became an expert, but as he had read H.T. Odum’s Environment, Power, and Society in 1971, he knew that everything he had learned was, in effect, how to turn fossil fuel into food. Going overseas to share this how-to knowledge would make more humans dependent on modern techno-industrial fossil-fueled society (and more food = more people), i.e. he would be doing harm long term.

So he never used his formal education to make any money. After the last day, he skipped doing the graduation thing and spent his summer doing farm work, but not for the incidental minimum wage he was paid. What could be better?

He did apply for a job (no need, no good reason) as an instructional assistant to help special ed teachers. He was chosen, perhaps based on the one essay question (there were over two hundred applicants and a lengthy proctored test given to all in the same place and time, and as he had graduated magna cum laude he likely aced the test), and so worked a year doing what most normal people do (dress up and show up).

Okay, end of school year, been there, done that, so he built a better box on the back of the family’s 1965 Chevy pickup his father gave him, and started living on the streets of Santa Barbara and frequenting the city library.

During his sedentary year of doing the “work” thing, he had taken up computer programing (C64) using a luggable portable(SX64), and he spent a year developing word processor software. He sold it to computer clubs (many at the time) by giving them a master copy, and whatever number of manuals, intro booklets, numbered disk labels, and keyboard overlies they ordered. They could add a dollar for copying and sell to members.

He made so much money (unintentionally) that he became a credible human, president of the local computer club. His status was high enough that 33 years ago (as I write this), a user came for user support, he provided it as usual, and she married him for lifetime user support, which he continues to provide.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

None of this seems to have anything to do with saving the world, and you’d be absolutely wrong again, as usual, if you think you are right. But to seemingly be more on topic, the Dude was “in student mode” until about 2014 when he noticed that he was surrounded by experts (idiot savants) who were cluelessly unaware of how the world really worked, as were those misinformed by them.

So, against all his instincts and better judgement, the Dude felt compelled to become a watchman, to declare what he seeth in front of his pug-nosed face — for posterity’s sake.

He was behind on his studies (domestic life can distract), so he started where his education (as distinct from schooling) had started, by reading the updated version of H.T. Odum’s book, mentioned above, that was published posthumously in 2007. And more books, articles, offerings, conferences followed.

In 2026 the Dude completed his 1742 hours of publicly protesting unsustainable denial (same as the number of times Al Bartlett gave his public lecture on Arithmetic, Energy and Population and for the same reason).

The way the Dude saved the world was by successfully spreading a recognition of humanity’s need to love that well which thou must leave ere long. Like every meme he spread, he had stolen it.

But it caught on. He had won some essay contest in 2024, but what saved the world was a video of him burning the prize money.

He converted it all into $100 dollar bills (so the video wasn’t too long), and in obvious triumph over Plutus, sat at a campfire and, in the pose of a meditating Buddha, burns each.

There are two candles by the fire, one bill’s length apart, and he remarks at one point that as all poets know, burning your candle at both ends gives a lovely light. It went viral on TikTok, public intellectuals were forced to refute his message (a URL was captioned) to humanity, but couldn’t, and that’s how the world was saved.

The public didn’t care about his message (they just saw the Dude as cool), but so many mimicked the Dude, by repeating his claims to taunt the establishment (to seem cool and get laid), that the intelligentsia (who pretend to be running the show) couldn’t ignore his claims.

It just happened that they were reaching a WTF moment when they realized they didn’t have a clue as to what to do, and that everything they had been doing was having the opposite outcome of what they intended. Worse, everything they thought they knew was falling in a faint glow of ashes all about them.

The Dude seemed to be yet another threat to their keeping on keeping on. They were starting to look over the net energy cliff. They were starting to see the Rocks of Dissolution below. They were afraid, deer-in-the-headlights afraid.

The Dude told them: Stand down.

For the first time in their lives, they could not obfuscate those like the Dude into going away. They who had seen themselves in the form of God on high and not as mere puppets — they could only mutter and mumble low.

Only by standing down from our hubris heights (before we fall down) can humanity hope to come to again love and understand the planet, and live with it properly.

Like Greta, the Dude was invited to go to the Davos den
of money changers and give his message, but he refused.

If you don’t love Mother, you are a pathological form of dysfunctional animal. Humans who would rather not be sick-minded, will step down and endeavor to go back to that which worked for our ancestors from the beginning of life to about 75k years ago when we mutated into an expansionist form of animal whose exceptionalism defies Nature.

We have forgotten that we are animals. To again endeavor to listen to Mother so as to thereby persist long term as the millennia pass is not wrong. Endeavoring to keep on keeping on as a non-viable metastatic pathogen is wrong (has no long-term viable outcome for humans, but the biosphere may benefit from our passing — Nature is unkind, but never wrong).

This was the meme that saved the world, changed humanity’s form of civilization. Of course, in 2050, there was still a remnant of rule by political animals who would rather die than see themselves as dysfunctional animals (humans of NIMH).

And they were dying, but they were still pretending to be running the world. They had fought the good fight against the Fascists and won. They claimed that the Dude’s message had been stolen from them, and they wrote 42 books proving they were right. So it was in this context that the Dude had written his essay in 2050.

Mt. Hubris, California

But the prosperity that was sweeping the world of the formerly hubris ones was not because of the Suave Ones, but despite them. The Dude had also explained why there could be no political solutions, and as this understanding spread, political animals mutated back to being evolvable cooperative animals (i.e. normal).

Conflict between the Fascists and those suavely pretending not to be fascists, was a distraction. The existence of independent sovereign individuals/states IS war. To understand this is to be delivered from your belief in sovereign powers (human exceptionalism)—and so the dream (of Lord Man) ends, Self and Other go away of their own accord. There is no one to blame, not even your alleged self.

The Dude’s radically Rₓevolutionary offerings (stolen from John B. Calhoun) were antithetical to the existence of the Suave Ones, so history in 2353 (403 AA) notes that the Suave Ones could not have been the source of the paradigm shift that saved the world (from expansionist humans).

They incorrectly attributed the change to the Mooper Dude by neglecting to note that he had never had an original idea in his life (neologisms are not ideas). The humans of 2353, as of today, persisted in telling stories that are not true (but their stories are better than the ones we tell and their belief in belief was still on the decline).

The Dude became the imagined source of ideas, a worldview, a mindset, (Mooper called it MILI). Humans came to love and understand the world system again as evolvable animals living within limits that Gaia alone defines. They stood down and again listened to Nature who has all the answers. They learn to think (political animals cannot) in systems, to live properly with Mother (who tells you when you are being good or bad if you will listen).

Humans came to just say no to patriarchy and became matrifocal again. To live cooperatively, in all due eudemonic love and understanding, they started to get over their five-year-olds-with-machetes (and cars) phase and grow up (by standing down in all due humilitus).

And that’s what saved the world (biosphere) from us moderns and posterity too even though they still had to pay our overshoot debt (but because of the Great Renormalization, they did not go extinct and had a relatively prosperous way down).

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

A new form of civilization will need a new language to preserve information packages.

Semantography: A logical language for preparing information packages for a near or far future

“If society does not succeed in changing attitudes and institutions for a harmonious descent, the alternative is to prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing.” — Howard T. Odum

The Garden

By Goody Lindley

What could I do – one person? And not just an ordinary person. I was far past my prime – pushing seventy. Yes, I knew we were in the middle of a climate crisis – and if the past summer with its forest fires and smoke obscuring the sun wasn’t enough to sound the alarm bells, there was the winter that locals said, was the first of its kind in their memories.

We lived in the West Kootenays on a mountainside acreage. By the end of January we should have been buried in a couple of metres of snow, and shovelling the driveway daily, only to get down to the road to find the snowplows hadn’t been able to keep up. Frozen water pipes and power outages should have been the norm. But we had no snow. Daytime temperatures refused to deep into the minuses. My skis were still stored in the shed and even my snowshoes were lonely.

What could I do? I was no Greta Thunberg! Heck, I wasn’t even one of the local high school kids collecting bottles and cans for the recycling depot.

And just as I was falling into despair, realizing that I wasn’t old enough to escape the full human-engineered catastrophe, I heard that some of the biggest Creston orchards had failed. The soft fruit tree buds had browned and withered during the winter’s one brief deep-freeze when the polar vortex had rolled down past a jet stream that had been faltering for years.

I took stock of our situation. My husband and I both drove electric vehicles – recent purchases. We recycled. We did everything we were supposed to do. We had a garden and an earth-battery greenhouse. Expand the garden? Sure – it wasn’t much, but we had some acres and it wouldn’t be too hard to  throw in a few more rows of potatoes and onions that would keep through the winter.

That spring, I got out and started digging. My back wasn’t happy about it, but then it didn’t exactly jump for joy whenever I lifted a laundry basket or a bag of dog food either, so it would just have to get used to the extra strain.

I bought massive sacks of seed potatoes at the local hardware store.

“That’s a lot of potatoes,” Marge said as she rang them through.

I plunked half a dozen bags of onion sets on the counter.

“That’s a lot of onions.”

I rifled thought the seed packets: beans, lettuce, tomatoes for the greenhouse, cucumbers, peppers, peas – an army of peas – squash, kale, chard, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, spinach – everything we liked to eat.

“You’re growing a lot this year,” Marge said. “Gonna preserve it all?”

“No – I don’t like preserving. I like growing and harvesting. And I can dry some of these – we have a drier.”

“If you’ve got extra, I’d preserve it for both of us.”

Oh! Okay – I’d never taken the thought that far. Sure. Why not?

I was planting my fifth row of potatoes when Chad stopped by to do some repairs to the soffits on the upper balcony. When he was done he came down to the garden to hand over his bill. I was leaning on my spade by then, trying to ease my rotten back.

“That’s a lot of hard work,” he said.

“Yes it is.”

“Do you have any help?”

“Simon helps when he can but he’s working.”

“My girlfriend could come by. She likes gardening but we don’t have any land.”

“Sure – that would be great. I’d be happy to share the harvest with her.”

“Done.”

Chad’s girlfriend, Lacey, brought her friend, June. The garden got planted faster than I could have imagined. Lacey suggested we dig up another half-acre of rich, sunny soil near the creek. Well, why not? If I was going to share the garden, we might as well make it big. June brought her mother out and Lacey brought her uncle with his rototiller.

After that, it just took on a life of its own. Simon and I had the land and all these other folks from the village had the strength and the will. But what was this? A co-operative? I had no idea how these things worked, and we all wanted it to be fair to everyone – there was enough land to feed us all. All we had to do was keep enriching the soil and practice good organic permaculture. Did we need rules? Laws? A constitution?

Chad said all we needed was good will, because there was enough for everyone and everyone was willing and happy to work together to give our little village food security.

Well, not everyone. The trouble began when I offered our tiny house rent-free to a young homeless couple who’d been living in a tent near the RV park. They’d been passing through, travelling from Vancouver to Calgary, getting a bit of work here and there. They’d just showed up one morning, hitching a ride with Lacey who said they were hungry and wanted to work for food.

But they had nowhere to sleep – only a ratty tent. We had a tiny home. Frank, one of the old Kootenay-born-and-bred natives, objected. “They’re just drifters – probably drug addicts. You let them stay in your tiny house and they’ll break into your house and steal everything they can get their hands on.”

I shrugged. “We never lock the door – no need to break in.”

“People like that – they’re nothing but trouble. They need to be in a city where they can access some sort of services.”

I dug in, royally pissed. Frank had hit one of my sore spots. “They’re homeless. They need a home. That’s it. If someone’s hungry, you give them food. If someone doesn’t have a home, you house them. It’s that simple.”

And just like that, our harmonious, peaceable kingdom where we shared and got along, divided sharply into two camps: the “you have to earn the right to food and a roof over your head,” side and the “food, shelter and clothing are a human right” contingent.

So – this was it – the story of humankind – the basics of the deep divisions in our society: Republicans versus Democrats, Conservatives versus Liberals, Dictatorships versus Democracy, traditional versus progressive, rich versus poor. Is this why we were doomed? Were we doomed?

A flash of memory: I was in my early twenties, walking home from work in downtown Toronto. There, under a storefront awning, a bearded man in nondescript clothes – something beige or brown, smeared with soot and dirt, crouched down on a ratty mattress, beside him a shopping cart stuffed with garbage bags, a roughly lettered cardboard sign in front of the tin on the sidewalk: “Homeless. Please Help!”

I stopped, a hundred thoughts flying through my mind and away – only one left behind –shock. I was standing on a sidewalk in one of the richest cities in one of the wealthiest countries in the world – and someone was homeless? How could that be? This wasn’t India or Cuba or Mongolia. This was Canada! How was this possible?

The shock never left me, and if I had a tiny house no one was living in, then I could offer it to people who needed a home.

I tried to convince Frank and the others – gave them positive statistics from other countries with policies of “homes first.”

I should have known better than to use logic. Right – if I couldn’t convince them, I’d show them. Maybe.

Cara and Jim moved in. Frank and his cronies came around less frequently. I agonized over our little problem until I felt like a hamster spinning on a wheel. Here were two of our biggest problems – food and shelter – the most basic of human needs. If we couldn’t solve that here on this tiny scale, how could the world deal with it? Was it really all about ideologies?

Capitalism says you have to earn the right to live; it also is based on the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet – clearly a bit of madness. So, in order to change the system, you first have to change the way we think. And how do we do that?

I had no answers. I wanted a cataclysmic event where one of the “old guard” was in trouble and Cara and Jim were the only ones with the skills to save the day. Then everyone would acknowledge their integrity and worth and we’d all live happily ever after. That happens in movies – not real life. Life tends to move more slowly than movies, less dramatically and more subtly, and change often happens long before you notice it.

Jim and Cara worked hard, even picking up a few odd jobs in the village. In late September, they moved on. By then, even Frank had got used to them, grudgingly acknowledging they’d worked hard.

The next year we added beehives and a wildflower meadow to the garden. Frank said that the small cottage he rented out as an Air B&B might be available for any young kids who wanted to help out on the farm. Sophie told her daughter in Victoria about it, and she had her husband moved in for the summer. It was a small thing. It seemed awfully big to me.

When our neighbouring village heard what we were doing, they came to visit, taking our ideas back with them. Then the local paper sent a reporter and photographer to have a look. Somehow, our story got syndicated and some filmmakers from California shot a documentary. I was interviewed a lot – a surreal experience, but I took the opportunity to talk about housing. It was easy enough to see what was happening on the land: the furrowed rows, the beans climbing up the corn stalks, but not as visible was the difference we were beginning to make with making housing affordable. People had basement suites, apartments above garages, and extra cottages that had been used as holiday rentals. What we were doing here wasn’t just about food  – it was also about shelter.

It was the documentary that really did it –  the beginning of a worldwide movement. What could you call it? Not a co-operative. It was more than that. Not once did we care or notice what religion anyone practiced or what their skin colour was, who they voted for, or what country they hailed from. All that mattered was a willingness to contribute and care.

Like a peach tree growing in a loamy well-drained soil, our success grew from the ground up. Our roots ran deep into what really mattered – caring for each other enough that the whys and hows didn’t matter. I think if we had started off with the concept of changing the world into what it is now: a place of peace and joy instead of a world of war and hate, we would never have started. The task would have been far too daunting.

We started by digging into the soil, planting seeds, and sharing with those around us – our little village. It continued by letting people be, by not convincing them that their worldview was wrong, and by letting change happen slowly and organically. And one day, we looked around and saw that our village was the earth we live on.

Who would have thought that I would live long enough to see a world like this – a world that is a garden that feeds and nurtures all of us? I’m still surprised that it all started with a few sacks of seed potatoes.