Look To The Next Horizon
"If Only" never made anyone happy...
Okay, so the Sailing Gods dangled a beautiful boat before me, and then laughed and yanked it away. It wasn’t a lot of fun in the moment, but as pained as my write-up was, and as kind as some of the responses have been, someone not getting a Morris 51 is deserving of exactly zero sympathy. It simply doesn’t rate at a time of planetary crisis. At all. No one needs a Morris 51. In fact, I could probably make a pretty good argument that no one even deserves a Morris 51 and that humanity as a whole would be better off if sailboats like the Morris 51s didn’t even exist. (But since they do, I couldn’t resist—hey, we are all fallible).
I don’t know what will come next, but I do know that whatever does come next will be all I really need. That is just about all I can be sure of, and I have to admit that the appeal of going to sea more frequently, and to voyage greater distances, is in part due to my increasing resignation that humanity is well on its way to abjectly failing to meet the accelerating existential threats of climate warming, habitat loss, and species destruction. Dire, science-based, warnings are apparently no match for the corporate capture of democracies, our tech-driven culture of misinformation and distraction, and the absolute triumph of growth, consumption and convenience over protecting vital ecosystems and nonhuman species (if you think about it, we are not even very good at protecting the human species, either).
There is a lot of social-science based conventional wisdom that says it is important to message existential threats carefully, with an uplifting and inspiring dollop of hope. The unvarnished truth is too scary and depressing. It will immobilize rather than mobilize. But none of that carefully massaged framing seems to be doing much good. “Blah, blah, blah” as Great Thunberg so perfectly put it, is the global response. She is scared. I am scared. But she is not immobilized; she is white-hot angry and relentless in her advocacy. In fact, being scared (along with a pretty clear sense of what basic ethical considerations require) has prompted me over the past decade to make steady changes in how I live my life and how I vote and engage with the world.
So maybe some brutal honesty about the fact that we are f*cking it all up, and it’s going to get really bad, is the way to go. Maybe we all should be more scared, not less. Humanity needs to start making radically different choices, and maybe fear is exactly what is needed to make that happen. We know what we have to do. The technology exists. The only real obstacles are personal inertia and preference, and a related lack of political will.
The thing I most admire about Great Thunberg, Bill McKibben, and many activists like them is that they keep pressing forward regardless of how much corruption, resistance, or indifference they encounter. I would love to have that resiliency and iron commitment, because what they do is the right thing to do. But I discovered something important about myself in the past few years: I get depressed by what I see happening and what I see not happening. I feel acutely the slipping away of time. That sense of frustration and hopelessness paralyzes me. And that insight brings me back to my search for a boat.
For me, a boat is a way to keep shrinking my personal footprint (plenty more to do) and immerse myself in the natural world. These are things that lift me up, that pull me from a malaise of cynicism and frustration. And if I can somehow convey through writing the transcendent beauty and importance of the natural world and everything in it, and the importance of changing individual and societal priorities to bring human culture, politics and economics into harmony with the natural world, instead of relentlessly exploiting and disrupting, I will be happy.
That is the sort of activism I can devote myself to wholeheartedly. So I have a plan. I have a vision. I just need a boat to get going.
But just in case, it shouldn’t go unmentioned that a boat could turn out to be the best place to be if things keep trending as they are.
So I will keep looking for a ship. In the meantime, I can focus on getting Moondust ready to sail again. Nothing feels better than bringing a sailboat back to life from winter hibernation.
And some good weather beckons. Hmm.
If you liked this post from Sailing Into The Anthropocene, why not subscribe here (free!), and/or hit that share button below? You can also find me on Instagram and Twitter.
Hi Tim - your post resonates well with me. I generally fluctuate somewhere between disgusted and outraged that we can’t move the needle fast enough when we already have many of the tools we need.
Setting a personal example isn’t going to make change happen on its own. Amplifying our individual voices through climate advocacy groups feels like it helps, or at least that you’re not alone yelling into the storm.
You can find some of my sailing/climate related musings at jeffsoldhouseblog.wordpress.com