In the time that we have left, pt. 2

 What work marks the early stages of a developing movement? Who does it? Are we already in the early stages? Whose work will history acknowledge?

How much or how little time should I spend figuring where exactly would I locate myself in the early history of this movement? Nowhere, probably. I've been in the peanut gallery for most of my adult life, doing whatever seemed most urgent at any given time. I certainly haven't been a thought leader in the nascent movement I wish to see gathering momentum. I haven't been an organizer or an activist. There were quite a few years when I mostly contented myself with emptying, then recycling beer bottles.

In any case, to calculate anyone's exact location in the multi-dimensional map of global movements begins, I suspect, with admitting that there has never before been a truly global movement. Unless, maybe, one supposes that the agricultural revolution was just such a movement. You know, the Agricultural Revolution, some 60-70,000 years ago? The one that made most of us farmers and pushed hunter-gatherers to the margins? Not a true movement, really. No hive brain at work there, either. But certainly an almost simultaneous global transformation. And, we would have to note that it's impossible to assess anyone's role in a transformation that began in prehistory, before there existed a single historian, or, even, a footprint thereof. Absent any model for assessing where anything actually starts or who started it, we probably need to begin developing some arbitrary criteria so that we can begin making a list of whoever might have made an early, and critical, contribution.

It's easy to imagine a reader arriving at this point in this post saying to themselves, or out loud to the universe, "what the hell are we talking about?" So, let's backtrack. This post is part two of an inquiry that began with yesterday's post. It is headed "in the time that we have left" because the earth is in jeopardy and almost all of the responsibility for that belongs to humans. We have so much to account for and no time for an accounting. The earth, the biosphere, the mass of all that lives and breathes and swims and flies and crawls is shrinking. The walls are closing in on us. If we and all the bio organisms around us are to survive what's coming in any remotely familiar form, we must become virtually unrecognizable to ourselves. We need to devolve.

And only a nearly universal consensus about the urgent need for human devolution will get the job done. So, again, what's the best next question? There must be nearly an infinity of possible answers to that question and I simply do not have the skill and ability to get to anything like a comprehensive answer to that question. Who does?

But I do keeping asking myself this question? Who are the pioneers who have/are/will catalyzing the movement in question? If there is already a list, who or what is on it? Again, a comprehensive answer would be one hell of a long list. But I say that no matter who qualifies for that list, one person who beyond any doubt belongs on that list is Octavia Butler.