A Blind Eye

My work on a memoir about my wife’s and my journey in philanthropy was interrupted by a New York Times article titled The Billionaire’s Backlash Against a Philanthropic Dream.

 

The story began in 2010 when Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett proposed The Giving Pledge, inviting billionaires to sign a pledge to give at least half their net worth to charity, preferably during their lifetimes. It seemed like a noble idea. 40 original signers grew to 250 signers worldwide.

 

It was inspiring to know that at least some of the world’s wealthiest people were committed to using their wealth to relieve suffering and to address the problems that humanity faced, most of which we had created. This was a counterweight to the forces that stepped on the downtrodden, creating inequality, injustice, suffering, and needless death. It was a saving grace in a world marked by conspicuous cruelty and greed.

But over the past two years, generosity stopped being fashionable. Many of the wealthy denizens of Silicon Valley have renounced the Pledge as a charade designed to sanitize excessive wealth and the people who possessed it. Charity had become an inconvenience that interfered with empire building and the quest for power. For some, the money was better spent buying influence with those at the levers of the power to make them even wealthier. It was simpler just to turn a blind eye to the suffering, the ravaging of the environment, and existential risk.

And those on the political right condemned most charitable causes as being too “woke,” a word that has been turned upside down as something to ridicule. Originally shorthand for an awareness of social injustices, the term, for me, encompasses compassion, concern for the suffering of others and a desire to lessen it, basic morality, and adherence to the Golden Rule. How did this become a slur and its adherents outcasts from the halls of power. When did greed, cruelty, and xenophobia become fashionable?

We are at a critical crossroads. Civilization can careen down a road to injustice, inequity, death, and destruction, allowing the rot in government to bleed into the private sector, leaving no succor for the downtrodden and little hope for our collective survival. Or it can recover its moral compass and use its vast resources to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and provide security and comfort for all.

Alligator Alcatraz - A Cruel and Shortsighted Idea

Governor DeSantis is building a detention facility for migrants in the middle of the Florida Everglades that will have a 30 square mile footprint in these wetlands. I’ve watched Fox News personalities exult at the brilliance of this plan and the horrors that migrants would experience if they tried to escape. The cruelty of the plan and of the people who cheer it exceeds the cruelty and persecution migrants fled in their own countries to seek asylum in ours. We should collectively be mortified that this is what our country is becoming.

There is much wrong with this plan. Logistically, it is hard to imagine that the facility will provide humane living conditions or protect detainees from the blistering heat they will encounter in that location. It is also hard to imagine that they will have access to emergency medical care. This facility will likely add to the mounting death toll that the roundup of migrants is exacting.

But it will also create an ecological disaster. The wetlands are a natural filtering system for spillover from Lake Okeechobee and other flooding as water makes its way to the sea. Without filtering, water that spills into the ocean carries concentrated nutrients that feed algae blooms, including Red Tide, which has been a scourge of the Florida coastline. Red Tide causes massive fish kills and kills and endangers coastal mammals including dolphins and manatees, an already endangered population. Red Tide toxins cause respiratory illness that, along with rotting fish in the waterways, drives coastal residents indoors and discourages tourism, the economic lifeblood of the state. Even the birds abandon areas where Red Tide prevails.

Alligators and pythons are more than a metaphor for the security of this facility. They are a metaphor for the cruelty, chaos, and shortsightedness of the way migrants are being treated by the people in power who vilify them.

War and Climate Change

 War is a major contributor to climate change. The early days of the Ukraine war (by November 2022) produced an estimated 80 megatons of carbon emissions (including estimated reconstruction costs), while the first four months of the Gaza war cost around 60 megatons. This is the equivalent of 30 million vehicles’ emissions over one year. Is it any surprise that blowing stuff up damages the environment?

As harrowing as are the costs of war to the combatants, the costs to the world at large are overwhelming. Climate change is a challenge requiring all nations to work together. We must recognize that its threat to all of us is greater than the threats among us and cease hostilities before we can address the common enemy.

The High Cost of Climate Change

While many people consider economic issues like inflation more important than climate change, they are tightly linked. Climate change is driving up the cost of goods and services across sectors. 

Increases in temperatures have an immediate effect upon power bills because of the increased demand on air conditioning. This affects residential power bills, but is also passed on to consumers in the form of increased prices in everything from the cost of restaurant meals and hotel bills to supermarket prices and the cost of manufactured goods.

Increases in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters from hurricanes to forest fires drive up the cost of new construction to mitigate these events as well as the cost of homeowners’ insurance, which may not even be available for disasters like hurricanes in coastal communities. The cost of the disasters themselves is escalating. Whole communities, like Sanibel Island and Ft Myers Beach, FL, have been wiped out. State and Federal governments shoulder much of the cost of rescue, cleanup and reconstruction, which will ultimately increase taxes and the national debt, destabilizing the economy. Depending upon the locations of these disasters, supply chains may be disrupted, driving up prices.

Worldwide increases in heat threaten food production and will inflate food prices. Current examples include the price of olive oil because of unfavorable growing conditions in the Mediterranean and the price and availability of cocoa products. But as previously fertile lands become arid, food staples will also become scarce and more costly. Livestock will be stressed. Some will die. The cost of keeping them alive and thriving will increase. Warming waters will threaten fisheries, killing fish and microorganisms at all levels of the food chain, further depleting already diminished populations. At best, we can expect the cost of all kinds of food to escalate. At worst, we may be faced with famine.

For all these reasons, climate change should rise to the top of voters' priorities in the coming election, particularly given the stark difference in perception and priorities between the candidates on both state and federal levels. Inflation has been referred to as a “kitchen table issue” because of its immediate perceived effect on well-being. But the inextricable link between climate change and the cost of living, not just for the distant future but for the present should place climate at the center of the table.

Gaza 2023 - How Did We Get Here?

The recent Hamas attacks on Israel is the result of both short-term and long-term determinants, with no solutions in sight. The policies of the Netanyahu government have added insult to the injury of oppressive living conditions that reach back decades if not centuries.

Gaza has never been self-governing and arguably has never been a cohesive ethnic or political entity. Part of the Ottoman Empire until 1918, it was then occupied by Britain for the next 30 years. When the UN recommended the partition of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states in November 1947, Israel accepted the plan, but the Arabs rejected it and launched a war of annihilation, which ended in their defeat. They came under Egyptian control from 1948 until June 1967, during which much of its population remained in refugee camps or similar conditions. perpetuating atrocious living conditions that fomented anger and violence, directed mainly at the most recent occupier, Israel. The wish for revenge among the population has fueled a renewed determination to eliminate the Jewish population entirely from the region.

The abandonment of the Palestinians has actually been a collective transgression, both in Gaza and in the West Bank. Why haven’t the nations (Egypt for Gaza and Jordan for the West Bank) of which they were a part before 1967 opened their doors to those in the territories who preferred not to be governed by Israel, instead of relegating them to impoverished refugee camps in a hostile environment? Has the hidden agenda been to leave them as a thorn in Israel’s side, even while ostensibly making peace?

Perhaps a way out, now that Egypt and Jordan are no longer Israel’s sworn enemies, would be for those nations to revisit their commitments to their former citizens and to the establishment of lasting peace in the region. For the West Bank, that might mean Israel ceding the territory not to a Palestinian state committed to its destruction but to Jordan, its partner in peace, to take responsibility for securing the borders and ensuring Israel’s sovereignty over its own land. For Gaza, the solution may require more creativity, given its limited contiguity with Egypt and its location almost entirely within Israel’s boundaries.

Given the concurrent threat of climate change and rising seas, the viability of the Gaza Strip as a place to live might already have a limited future. Creating an alternative, welcoming homeland might provide the most humane solution for a struggling population.

Who is Protecting Children's Lives?

While conservatives have done everything possible to guarantee the rights of fetuses to be born into this perilous world, liberals are dedicated to protecting the lives and welfare of sentient living children.

• By advocating for the rights of all children not to go hungry

• By advocating for the rights of all children to have access to medical care

• By advocating for the rights of all children to live in healthy environments free of toxins and pollution that would threaten their health and cognitive development

• By advocating for the rights of all children to be educated and reach their potential

• By opposing the proliferation of weapons of war on our streets and in our schools. Gun deaths are now the leading cause of childhood deaths, and gun suicides in the US are at an all time high.

• By acknowledging the reality of human caused climate change and advocating for measures to mitigate it. Climate change not only threatens the future lives of children and future generations, it is already claiming countless lives today worldwide with natural disasters, heat waves, drought, famine, and imperiled water supplies.

  
  

When we protect the lives of children and the disadvantaged and improve the environment for every human being and every species of life on the earth, who can that possibly hurt?

Renewable Energy Can Blow Inflation Away

Aside from the crucial role of renewable energy sources in preventing climate change from making our planet uninhabitable, they also have considerable economic benefit. The current inflation crisis brings into focus the need for measures against inflation going forward. Renewables offer a powerful tool to accomplish this.

The causes of inflation are numerous. Not the least of these is energy costs. As the price of fossil fuels rises, the impact hits many areas of our economy. Direct energy costs are passed on to the consumer in the price of gasoline, the price of fuels for heating homes, and the price of electricity, each adding an inflation surcharge to each household’s monthly expenses. These added costs are already mitigated for households owning electric vehicles and those deriving their energy from renewables either directly, for example from rooftop solar panels, or indirectly, via utilities that use renewable energy sources.

The cost of fossil fuels, however, also contributes to the rising cost of consumer goods. Manufacturing goods requires enormous expenditures of energy. And transporting them from the point of manufacture through the various waypoints to final delivery consumes enormous amounts of fuel. Each step adds to the final cost of products.

Once the infrastructure to capture renewable energy is built, the cost of delivering energy becomes vanishingly small and remarkably stable. The episodic shortages, either because of naturally occurring events or the manipulation of supply by entities who control it, that have whipsawed oil prices until now would no longer occur in an economy based largely on renewable energy. Increasingly efficient energy storage systems would eventually meet seasonal demands. And the direct cost of energy to consumers would no longer threaten their security. While the price of goods would still fluctuate somewhat with supply and demand, the added effect of escalating fuel costs would no longer apply.

Climate change itself contributes to inflationary pressures through damaging effects upon crop production, livestock maintenance, forests, and other resources. The scarcity of these resources results in higher prices to consumers for everything from food to manufactured goods. And the destructive power of extreme weather events adds to scarcity and the demand for materials to repair the damage as well as an increased demand for fuels to heat or cool our homes.

Inflation is a political rallying cry that threatens to divide our nation further. But it should also be a wake-up call for those in power to unite in support of legislation designed to mitigate climate change by powering the future of our nation and the world with renewable energy.

Where Have all the Patriots Gone?

WWII posed a grave threat to America that was met by the greatest generation. Those Americans who did not go to war answered the call of their country to make sacrifices and pitch in to the effort to deter the foreign aggressors. They accepted rationing of goods and services, including food and fuel. Some left their jobs and professions to work in the factories that supported the troops. Most Americans rose to their patriotic duty.

We have recently faced a more insidious and deadly threat: COVID-19. And again, Americans have been asked to make sacrifices: Get vaccinated and wear masks in public in order to deter the enemy and prevent its lethal effects from spreading. We’ve been urged to support the troops, in this case the frontline healthcare workers in harm’s way who have suffered many casualties. Many have risen to this duty, but a substantial minority have refused, resulting in a death toll nearly twice that of WWII and 140 times the toll of the 9/11 attacks, not to mention the countless left wounded with chronic disease.

Where have all the patriots gone? How would the greatest generation have responded to this threat? Do true patriots heed only the bugles of military conflict? Or, in our complex world, should patriotism mean working together to repel any threat to our fellow citizens?

Homo sapiens: Crafting Our Ecological Niche

 All the laws of nature will bend and adapt themselves to the least motion of man.

Henry David Thoreau

Conservation is caring enough about something other than yourself that you want to save it in abundance for someone you don’t know.

J Drew Lanham

As we consider the next stage of our life and of our giving, the framework for our decisions should be a vision for how the world of the future should look. The world of our descendants should be a world in which children aren’t afraid to grow up, a world of abundance that is sustainable, healthy, safe, and just, not only for people, but for every species with which we share the earth.

Greed for life, possessions, and comforts has dominated human culture until now and has cost the lives of countless other species, while threatening our very existence with climate change and the exhaustion of resources crucial to our survival. We have harvested or squandered most of the wildlife of the seas. We have driven many land species to extinction. The loss of diversity, including bees and other insects, threatens to render the earth sterile and incompatible with all life.

Our quest for technological miracles proceeds willy nilly without sufficient consideration of the unintended consequences. Medical science is hot on the trail of the Holy Grail of radical life extension without considering the consequences. The longer we live, the greater the competition for ever scarcer resources. And the longer each of us lives, the greater our carbon footprint. Extending the lifespan for some can mean extreme deprivation for others and a sharper divide between the wealthy and the poor. And it could accelerate the exhaustion of the resources necessary for our species and every other species to survive.

What would my world of the future look like? 

It would be a world of sharing our habitats and resources, including food, water, and shelter, with all human beings and with other species, even in the face of individual sacrifice.

It would be a world of preserving diversity. We are learning that a multitude of species is good for the health of the planet. And it stands to reason that diversity within our species is good for the health of humanity. We should create a world in which plants, animals, and humans can all flourish.

It would be a world in which we learn to understand the needs of other species and to communicate with them. We are not the only intelligent species on the planet and perhaps not the most intelligent. But for our opposable thumbs, we may never have become dominant. We must respect the mammals of the seas, including whales and dolphins, intelligent land species like elephants and their sense of community, and even some of the tinier, more alien seeming species like the octopus. Learning to understand their languages and their communities, as Project CETI seeks to do with sperm whales, would go a long way toward developing empathy with them and respect for their rights.

As homo sapiens, we should live up to the “wise” in our name and learn to craft an ecological niche for our species that respects our place in a diverse world and acknowledges the life cycle. We should protect our common resources and strive for equity both across species and within our own. We should be willing to sacrifice some of our individual desires in the interest of the common good and become better citizens of Planet Earth.

Move Protests to the Ballot Box

 It's time for protests to move from the streets to the ballot box. While non-violent protests arise out of the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, in the current political climate a disturbing trend has developed. Overreaction of law enforcement with aggressive responses to peaceful protests has inflamed the process, resulting in escalation to more destructive activity. The underlying peaceful protests appear to be overshadowed by opportunists and other bad actors with conflicting motives, leading to a lack of clarity about the perpetrators of vandalism, looting, and other violence. Are these the actions of the protesters, of common criminals, or perhaps even of others who wish to cast the protesters in a negative light?

This plays into the hands of Donald Trump and his supporters as they push an agenda based on "anarchy in the streets." It has led to justification of further escalation of law enforcement response, of the criminalization of protesters, peaceful or not, and talking points in campaign speeches and rallies. The perversion of events is exemplified by VP Pence's statement during his RNC speech spotlighting the murders during the Kenosha protest, while conveniently omitting that it was the murder of two protesters by a presumptive right wing extremist.

The most effective intervention to address violence against minorities in our nation would be a resounding defeat of Donald Trump in the upcoming election. Continuing protests in the street risk jeopardizing the chances of that victory. With only nine weeks left until the November 3 election, a moratorium on demonstrations should be declared. The time and energy spent on demonstrations would better be deployed in constructive activities to ensure the integrity of the election and prevent voter suppression. This could include volunteering to staff the polls in place of the many elderly poll workers who are at the greatest risk from COVID-19 and are likely to opt out of election duty to protect their health.

Othering

Hate isn’t about the need to suppress “bad apples.” Discrimination is too often justified on the basis of obnoxious behavior by a few members of a group. Hate and oppression is the result of “othering,” perceiving others as different from oneself in appearance, culture, or beliefs. Othering is the root of everything from genocide to religious persecution. It’s cultivated by despots in order to acquire and hold power. It’s embraced by individuals as a means of self-validation. When we “other,” we’re saying, “I’m good because you’re bad. I’m valuable because you’re not.”

Discriminatory and violent policing of African Americans has been justified by some with the observation that black people commit more crimes. That they are more often arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for crimes is at least as much a result of this perception as of an actual increase in crime rate. And any real increase in crime rate among this population is a direct outgrowth of desperate economic circumstances. Poor people may be driven to steal to feed their families. Rich people steal for greed or sport.

Expelling Mexicans from our country has been justified by pointing out high profile crimes by immigrants or by naming high profile gangs. Their real offense, however, in the eyes of the haters is looking and sounding different. White males have committed many horrible crimes, including serial killings, domestic acts of terror, and many acts of sexual aggression. Heavily armed gangs of white males have created civil unrest that targets minorities with sometimes lethal results. White collar crime is a euphemism for stealing from others by gaming the system. Should we therefore propose to expel all white males in order to eliminate these threats?

Rwanda is an object lesson in othering. In the early part of the 20th century, Belgian colonialists taught half the population of Rwanda to hate the other half. They began by defining the physical characteristics that they claimed distinguished Hutus from Tutsis and assigned official racial identities to every Rwandan. No matter that these distinctions were so arbitrary that even members of the same family were often assigned different racial identities. They then set up a power structure based on these distinctions that bred such resentment that it resulted in two genocides within half a century. Epithets, such as “cockroach,” were one of the tools with which Hutus were encouraged to despise their Tutsi neighbors. And when the last genocide was over, the veil of hate lifted somewhat, and many of the perpetrators were horrified to realize what they’d done to their former neighbors, friends, and even family members.

Science fiction uses gruesome imagery to spotlight the threat of aliens from other worlds, a metaphor for the enduring othering pervading human culture. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is a particularly poignant example in which the enemy is an insect-like race designated the “buggers” and presumed to be bent on our destruction. The title character grows up to realize that he’s been instrumental in the genocide of a noble race of creatures that were just trying to defend themselves from us. And we can expect that sentient AIs risk becoming the next underclass to be oppressed upon the assumption that they mean harm to carbon-based humans.

Lest we go down the path of Rwanda and of Nazi Germany, we must call out othering for what it is and renounce it. It’s time we realized that we’re all more alike than different, right down to our genomes. It’s time to correct the inequities in circumstances and opportunities in our culture and the inequities in how we treat one another. It’s time to replace hate with compassion.

Arresting Aging: An Existential Threat

Scientists are closing in on the Holy Grail of aging research: the capacity to arrest aging and extend the lifespan to hundreds of years. Recent genetic studies have identified mutations in a pair of genes that humans share with roundworms, each of which modestly extends the lifespan of the roundworm, but which work synergistically to magnify the effect. Drugs are in the early stages of development to alter the cellular pathways governed by these genes. If successful, people could remain youthful and healthy for centuries, with reduction or elimination of a host of age-related diseases, including heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Among the benefits would be the capacity for long distance space travel and the ability to accumulate vast knowledge with extended lifelong learning.

But with noble pursuits often come unintended consequences with dark implications. An early effect could be a striking increase in the divide between the rich and the poor. Such treatments are likely to be costly and, at least at the beginning, available only to the wealthy. So added to differences in quality of life would be a priceless difference in longevity. This raises both moral issues and the likelihood of intensifying class warfare and social disorder.

Extending the lifespan of even a fraction of the population would eventually lead to unsustainable demands upon resources and the environment. Even with advances in food technology, feeding everyone would eventually become impossible. The poor would be the first to suffer, but eventually everyone would be at risk of starvation. And as we continue to consume all manner of goods, the mountains of waste we create will grow huge, even if we master the arts of recycling and creating biodegradable products. We will increasingly risk polluting our waters and food sources, impacting health in unforeseen ways that could introduce terrible new chronic diseases and disabilities that could last as long as we do.

Assuming that we don’t all agree to stop reproducing, an outcome with its own dreadful implications, the population will inevitably find ways to curb itself. One obvious outcome would be a drastic increase in violent conflict, including international warfare, civil wars, class wars, and genocide, perhaps inflicted by the privileged upon the poor in order to retain the resources to sustain their vastly extended lives. And if we fail to keep our numbers in control, the earth will inevitably develop an immune response to fight our infestation, perhaps in the form of more robust infectious diseases to which even the superhuman among us would succumb.

Even if we succeed, against all probability, in navigating the solutions to these problems, how would we adapt to life without end? Would there be some point for most of us, once we’ve run through our “bucket lists” to our satisfaction, that we would decide that enough is enough? Endless life might not be all that we would envision and could eventually become a burden that we would yearn to end. In the prescient 1973 science fiction film “Soylent Green,” teeming humanity has outgrown the limits of its resources, euthanasia has become the universal prescription for ending lives, and recycling human bodies as food has become a key strategy for preventing starvation.

Our capacity for innovation is increasing exponentially. Are we about to outsmart ourselves into oblivion or will we learn to predict the consequences of our discoveries and choose wisely what we pursue?

Creating a Deadly State of Mind

Home grown killers with a diversity of motives have inflicted the overwhelming majority of casualties from mass attacks and terrorism over the last decade. A few have been radicalized by the influence of foreign entities. Others have been driven by mental illness. Some attacks were hate crimes against racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Still others were motivated by revenge or desperation. US Mass Shootings 1982-2016

Donald Trump has pledged to keep us safe by proposing increases in spending on the military and Homeland Security designed to protect us all from the Enemy at the Gate, while slashing funds to social programs.

The budget proposed by this administration threatens our security far more than any measures to stop the Enemy at the Gate protect it. Drastic reductions in access to health care, food, and housing for the most disadvantaged among us threaten to create a vast community of the desperate and will damage the health and development of a generation of children, who will be ill-equipped to rise from the poverty in which they are raised.

Desperate people do desperate things. How many will be driven to crime in order to survive and how many of those crimes will be violent? How many of us will die at the hands of the hungry? How many at the hands of the homeless or sick? How many will die at the hands of the disillusioned and enraged? And how many at the hands of the mentally ill who no longer have access to care that quiets the storm within?

Desperate people do desperate things and are drawn to desperate solutions. The hungry, homeless, and angry are most vulnerable to radicalization. They can be seduced by ideologies that appear to sympathize with their predicament and they have little to lose. Why not strike back at a society that seems to have forgotten them? How many of us will die at the hands of the radicalized poor? And how many at the hands of their children who grow up impoverished, uneducated, and even more desperate than their parents?

We are closing our borders and sending people back to war torn countries to suffer in squalor and chaos or to die. How many of those we turn back, who might have become loyal citizens, will become disillusioned, enraged, and radicalized. How many of us will die at the hands of the spurned and abandoned? And how many at the hands of their grieving and enraged friends and family who live among us?

When we deprive millions of our citizens of basic subsistence and close our borders to those fleeing war and chaos, how can we expect to be safe? How can we expect to be free? And how can we live with the shame of abandoning our needy neighbors in a nation that is supposed to be devoted to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...for all?

The Other Inheritance Tax

Repealing the estate tax has long been a dream of Republican lawmakers. This is a 40% tax on all assets exceeding $5.45 Million for an individual decedent or twice that exemption for a couple. Those who want to repeal it believe that our descendants are all entitled to the fruits of our labor and to live at least as well as their forebears.

I share the ideal that our descendants should enjoy a quality of life at least as good as ours, which makes it crucial to abolish the other inheritance tax: the quality of life taxed to future generations for every gallon of fossil fuel burned.

Global warming as a consequence of human activity has become an incontrovertible fact of science. The cost to future generations is incalculable. Effects include a rapidly increasing frequency of severe storms, floods, droughts, and other natural disasters, the accelerating loss of the polar ice caps accompanied by rising seas, acidification of the oceans with an accompanying decimation of marine biodiversity, and extinctions of species leading to a staggering loss of terrestrial biodiversity. A huge unanswerable question is whether or not we would be one of the surviving species.

Sweeping changes to the landscape of our planet will likely include coastal flooding and the reshaping of the boundaries of our land masses as well as regional climate changes that will threaten the food and water supplies of whole populations, leading to mass migrations and a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions. Aside from the inherent suffering of these populations, such conditions become breeding grounds for violent conflict and recruitment to radical causes.

Since the process of global warming feeds itself, much has been said of the “tipping point,” the moment in time at which the process becomes irreversible and life on earth is eventually doomed. Some believe that we have already crossed it. Others suggest that it is close at hand. It is likely, in any case, that every year in which we contribute to the problem matters. Even the next four years could determine whether or not we step off the edge of the cliff.

It is time for those we elect to public office to put aside their differences and address the big problems that will shape the world to come. Ignoring or denying these problems gambles the survival of our species. Putting off the solutions in the interest of short-term gains may deprive future generations of a chance to live. And that’s the ultimate pro-life position.

Where Does Identity Reside?

Having spent recent months crafting a sequel to The Methuselarity Transformation, I have felt suspended between the reality of my everyday life and relationships and the lives of the characters in my fantasy world. Between stints at the laptop turning out words that portray the experience of my characters, I’ve found myself drawn inside their heads and points of view, experiencing their crises and working through their solutions to the conflicts they face as their stories unfold. In this way, my characters teach me what it’s like to be them, sometimes providing unexpected lessons about the nature of experience, of consciousness, and of identity.

In Brink of Life, a woman suddenly plunges into consciousness in the midst of what seems like someone else’s life, sending her on a quest to discover who she is and to craft an identity that makes sense within the context of her present circumstances. One of the lessons that emerged as I watched her life unfold through her eyes was that consciousness is more than a state of mind. It’s a state of being defined not only by the brain, but by the characteristics of the body that is the interface for perceiving the world and for acting upon it. And each of our bodies comprises a complex array of elements that color the way we understand our surroundings and ourselves.

Just a few of the ways our bodies are hardwired include the sensitivity of tuning of each of our senses (or even whether those senses are working at all), potential for muscle development and coordination, sexual preference and identification, our ability to taste salty or bitter things, our thresholds for pain and for pleasurable reward, and even the limits of our capacity to experience joy. Fold in a lifetime of sensorimotor experience within these bodies to round out the complexity of how we perceive our identities. Our adaptation to aging, to disease, and to recovery from disease further illustrates the fluid relationship between the body and the self.

Futuristic concepts of immortality have included models in which consciousness is uploaded to computers (Transcendence), embodied within digital avatars (The Matrix), or even linked to other physical entities (either biological or artificial) capable of interacting with the physical world (Avatar). These conceptions assume a model of consciousness and identity as something abstractly residing within the brain, apart from their physical incarnation. Perhaps our intelligence is separable from our bodies, but what would it take to maintain a persistent sense of self rather than just to create an authentic looking copy?

Sex on the Reef

When some people think of coral, they imagine chunks of rock resembling the human brain or delicately branching structures of exquisite detail and fragility. For others, coral brings to mind colorful jewelry, strung as beads of white and pink. These are all the calcified secretions of a vibrant community of microscopic animals that make their homes upon the structures that they create, animals that reproduce sexually in their struggle to survive. And struggle they must, our tiny heroes, because only one out of many thousands of fertilized eggs survives and may take hundreds of years to grow as big as the specimens that dazzle in a seaside souvenir shop.

In the best of circumstances, our reefs teem with life, supported by a luminous community of coral species responsible for both creating the structural backbone of the reef and mediating the cycle of life within it. Cyanobacteria living symbiotically with the corals extract nitrogen from seawater and convert it to a form that is nutritive to plants, and in turn moves up the food chain of the animal population.

While coral reefs cover less than 0.1% of the ocean floor, they support astounding biodiversity that accounts for at least a quarter of all marine species, including at least 4000 species of fish and possibly millions of distinct species ranging from microorganisms and plants to crustaceans and sponges. A quarter of all fish harvested for human consumption come from reef environments. Aside from their crucial contribution to our food source, reefs provide a physical barrier that protects coastlines from the erosive effects of waves and the destructive force of storms, buffering coastal communities against the threats posed by rising sea levels and increasingly turbulent weather. Corals have also been a source of naturally occurring medicinal compounds.

These aquatic colonies and the reefs that support them have come under pressure that now threatens their existence and ultimately ours. Much of this pressure arises from human activity, including coastal development, dredging, pollution, fishing, mining for building materials and...yes...souvenirs, oil spills, even sunscreen! And the effects of manmade global warming include rising temperatures and acidification, both of which cause coral bleaching, reducing reefs to lifeless stone. Even without the need to adapt to drastically changing conditions, the slow growth of these organisms makes it impossible for them to replenish themselves without help. And marine scientists have spent years trying to raise corals with which to reseed reefs.

* * *

Enter Mote Tropical Research Laboratory in the Florida Keys and Dr. David Vaughan, a weathered looking biologist with a bushy rust and salt beard that frames an animated smile underscoring his enthusiasm for educating visitors about corals. A pivotal moment of serendipity combined with mindful observation and inspiration led to a discovery that has accelerated the rate of coral growth in the laboratory by orders of magnitude. While corals tend to repair themselves by growing faster when broken, they grow many times faster when fractured into tiny fragments. Dr. Vaughan first observed this effect as the result of a laboratory accident and has since utilized it as a cultivating technique that has increased new colonies from tens to many thousands and is expected within the next several years to create hundreds of thousands of colonies that will be planted in the wild and are expected to rebuild reefs in a fraction of the time that nature once required.

Even more exciting is the assist that Dr. Vaughan and his team is giving to natural selection. By creating microenvironments with gradations of both pH and temperature, they have managed to simulate a range of possible conditions that might occur decades from now and select coral cultures best adapted to the most stressful conditions that we can predict, while still preserving biodiversity.

All life as we know it would be threatened by the extinction of the corals. While we may worry more about international conflict and terrorism as threats to our existence, the coral nurseries at Mote may well be ground zero for the survival of our species.

Life Overtakes Art

One of the challenges of writing science fiction is to imagine future technology that has a plausible scientific foundation but is still likely to be sufficiently ahead of its time to be truly futuristic. So it is simultaneously validating and discouraging when present day technological advances rapidly eclipse fictional scenarios set decades in the future.

In The Methuselarity Transformation, I envisioned a process that could arrest the aging process at the cellular level and make young adults virtually immortal. Meanwhile, scientists seem to be closing in on ways not only to arrest aging, but to reverse it.

When the circulations of young and aged mice were linked, the elderly mice became more youthful in a number of meaningful ways, including rejuvenation of both heart and skeletal muscle and an improved sense of smell suggesting some reversal of brain aging. These changes apparently derived from something in the younger animals’ blood that neutralized the effects of aging. A team at Harvard subsequently identified a protein, GDF11, isolated from the blood of young animals that appears in decreasing concentrations with age and seems to mediate anti-aging effects. This appears the closest mankind has come so far to discovering a fountain of youth...at least for mice.

While it has been painfully found in the quest for a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease that agents that work in mice don’t easily translate to effective drugs for humans, other basic science advances have potentially shortened the time it will take to determine whether such cures will prove helpful in humans. Induced pluripotent stem cells, derived from people with various disease states, can act as substrates for testing chemicals on disease processes outside the body. This same strategy might well prove useful in testing the effects of GDF11 or similar molecules on human tissue as a stepping stone to human clinical trials.

A separate line of investigation is pursuing the effects of CRISPR, a new technology for precisely editing genes as well as regulating gene activity. This could soon provide a way to turn on specific genes that may have a role in extending longevity. It may even become possible in the very near future to harvest skin cells from patients, induce the stem cell state, edit their genomes and then supply the modified cells to malfunctioning organs to restore their youthful states. And the next decade may even bring a real possibility of rolling back aging altogether and reversing the effects of age-related diseases.

Conservation at a Turtle's Pace

For the last several decades, conservationists on Florida’s coasts have been protecting sea turtle nests by patrolling the beaches in the early morning during nesting season, finding new nests, and marking their locations to prevent people from trampling them. Rules have emerged to extinguish beachside lights at night during nesting season to prevent disorienting the turtles and later the hatchlings as they make their way back to the sea. Volunteers are on hand during the night to assist wayward hatchlings in finding their way to the water. This has been an exercise in faith, since the time from hatching to maturity and reproduction is around 30 years, depending upon species.

In the Sarasota area, the Mote Marine Laboratory has overseen this effort for the past 30 years. As I walked the beach this morning on Longboat Key, I encountered excited volunteers, working feverishly to mark an unprecedented number of new nests. This has been a banner year for sea turtle nesting here. They explained to me that the sharp increase in nesting might be the proof of concept from the earliest days of the program. Sea turtles usually return to the beaches on which they hatched to lay their eggs. Many of this year’s adults may have been protected in the nest and assisted back to the sea by caring hands 30 years ago. One has to wonder who those volunteers were way back then and what paths their lives have taken in the intervening years. Could they have envisioned the return of their charges so long in the future? How many of those still alive think about their mission today?

This is how conservation works. Small acts can have large effects in a distant future. The value of measures taken today cannot be adequately assessed in a year or two or even a decade, but must be viewed through a lens that may span half a century or more. And similarly, the cost of measures foregone must be viewed through a similar lens. Protecting species or the environment itself is an act of faith and an act of reverence for the earth. Our survival depends upon people with such vision.

We Have Met the Alien and He Is Us

In The Methuselarity Transformation, I envision a religion based upon messages embedded in our genetic code by an alien, and presumably long extinct, civilization. This new twist on Intelligent Design neither invokes an omniscient or eternal designer nor requires evolution to be invalid. It only assumes that some piece of our genetic code has been deliberately written at some stage of its evolution and propagated forward unchanged.

Genomic SETI, the search for intelligent messages within our genetic code, has been discussed in an earlier post: http://bit.ly/X0iAeA. By looking for linguistic patterns within segments of our DNA that don’t clearly code for function, scientists have made a case that these sequences are not only non-random, but bear the signature of an intelligent entity.

How advanced would a civilization have to be in order to be able to tinker with the genome and embed messages within it?  In the process of decoding the genome, we have begun to reverse engineer many of the processes that build and modify it, and have come to the point that we can begin to edit DNA precisely in order to eliminate functions that are detrimental to the organism and introduce functions and qualities that enhance its ability to survive and to thrive. And we are already capable of constructing strands of DNA from scratch out of standardized building blocks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioBrick) in order to make biologically based digital components or to modify nature.

The ability to use DNA as a communication medium is an almost trivial outgrowth of this technology. As early as 2005, researchers developed an alphabet based upon triplets of DNA nucleotides and encoded the first verse of a Christmas poem into the genome of a strain of the bacterium E. coli. As we become increasingly sophisticated in our ability not only to compose sequences of DNA, but also to stabilize selected sequences over many generations as organisms mutate and propagate, it is entirely conceivable that this medium will become the most enduring and practical means of recording the history of our civilization across the ages, embedded within the biology of a future world for an intelligent species to decode once it has sufficiently evolved.

Why then would it be less plausible that an ancient civilization has endeavored to tell its story in this manner than that ours will strive to do so in order to preserve our history for eternity? To paraphrase Walt Kelly’s venerable character Pogo (http://bit.ly/1CBA8wT): we have met the alien and he is us.

Wooden Puppets and Four Dollar Words

While serious fiction writing began for me later in life, my love of words has roots in early childhood. My father, who was a young adult during the Great Depression, was both frugal and articulate. Conversations with him were liberally sprinkled with four dollar words, for none of which he ever paid more than a buck ninety eight. His epistles (a word he would definitely have favored) to his children and grandchildren have become treasured remembrances of him and his distinctive way of communicating.

A couple of exceptionally talented creative writing teachers in high school made writing fun, Dr. Campbell in the 10th grade and Miss (not Ms!) Busse in the 11th. (We were never privy to our teachers’ given names, even in yearbooks.) Early in the year, Dr. Campbell asked us to rewrite a fairy tale in the style of a favorite author. Here is what I wrote:

PINOCCHIO

As it may have been told by Robert Penn Warren

After my fight with Eve Stevens, I went fishing. I drove home and got my permit and gathered my tackle and tossed my rod and reel into the trunk and sped off. For fishing is where you go when you’ve assassinated the President or stolen a candy bar or fought with Eve Stevens. You go to fish for bass or trout or pickerel. It’s where you go to catch a perch. It’s where you go to catch a boot or a cold. And sometimes, you pull up the line, and there, all shriveled up in the hot sun, tiny and pathetic, curled into a little ball, lies a truth. You don’t see it at first. But then, there it is with the point of the glittering stainless steel hook sticking out the top. I went fishing.

I caught a truth.

For it was at the Cambridge Reservoir that I first learned the truth about Pinocchio. You can be just sitting there fishing. You’re waiting for a tug on the line and suddenly you look up and there above you is a tree. I looked up and saw a tree. And you think, “That’s an oak tree. Pinocchio was once an oak tree. Maybe that’s Pinocchio.” It’s a warm, secure feeling to be alone and suddenly realize that you have company and that company is a tree and that tree is like a person and it is not a person. And then the tree is Pinocchio, not the flesh and blood Pinocchio, not even Pinocchio the living puppet, but the essence of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet, the real Pinocchio. The living Pinocchios were not the real Pinocchios. They were something else. They were but corruptions of the Carven Switch. The second Pinocchio, the wooden boy, the living puppet, was not the same as the oaken figure. It told a lie and its nose grew. But the nose grew from the lie and the lie from Pinocchio. And each piece of nose was but the incarnation of a lie and became an outgrowth of the Big Switch. The lie became the nose and the nose took root in the body and circulated its poisons throughout the fibers and the puppet became the lie and was no longer Pinocchio, no longer just a Carven Switch.

Take a puppet and give it life and make it into a living lie. Then give it flesh and a heart and a pair of kidneys and you have even a bigger lie. Give it life so the skin sweats and the eyes weep and the gall bladder secretes its resinous fluids. You know that all you have is still just a lie incarnate. The Kindly Old Toymaker thought he’d created himself a son. You want to tell him that this is not a son, but only a lie incarnate evolved from a Big Switch. Then you stop. You, too, are just flesh and blood. No more real, less real perhaps, than Pinocchio, for he was once a Big Switch and you, from the day of your birth, are a lie incarnate. You can no longer point to anything and say, “That is a lie.”

So you look up at the tree and now you know the truth about Pinocchio and about the Kindly Old Toymaker and about the Big Switch. And you feel secure in the knowledge. And you look around and see all those people who are really just lies incarnate. And you pity them because they don’t know about Pinocchio.

I knew. I had gone fishing.

(circa 1962)