​A visionary advocacy project COMPASSION FOR THE FUTURE .....for the creation and publication of guides, manuals, encyclopedias and other written materials for people living in the last days of humankind 20 to 30 generations from now, maybe as soon as ten generations from now, that will help them and their loved ones prepare for and learn how to lie down and die en masse when the time comes, and to die with grace and dignity and a new kind of spiritual awareness of what was happening to them and why.

 

Compassion For the Future (CFF) : a 500-year collection of writings, videos, ideas for readers in the coming 5 centuries. We welcome *you* to join us. This is an ongoing work-in-progress, started on January 1, 2019.

​[This informal interview is about Dan Bloom’s [quiet soft-spoken] advocacy for the creation and publication of guides, manuals, encyclopedias and other written materials for people living in the last days of humankind 20 to 30 generations from now, maybe as soon as ten generations from now......that will help them and their loved ones prepare for and learn how to lie down and die en masse when the time comes....... and to die with grace and dignity and a new kind of spiritual awareness of what was happening to them and why.

Read with caution and take away whatever you wish to take away from it. Or, don't take anything away from it at all, if it is not your cuppa tea.]

INTERVIEWER: Dan Bloom is a visionary gadfly who is more active on Twitter than most people half his age. He's 70 now, he'll be dead soon. In 2011, he started promoting the literary term “cli-fi,” now used to describe one of the publishing world’s trendiest literary genres. ......I wanted to know more about Dan’s project he calls COMPASSSION FOR THE FUTURE and his advocacy of the creation and publication of guides, manuals, encyclopedias and other written materials for people living in the last days of humankind 20 to 30 generations from now, maybe as soon as ten generations from now, that will help them and their loved ones prepare for and learn how to lie down and die en masse when the time comes, and to die with grace and dignity and a new kind of spiritual awareness of what was happening to them and why. So I asked.

Question: First of all, let me get this clear from you. Is it true that you do not believe their is any political solution or technological fixes that will solve the problems of runaway global warming?

Dan Bloom: It's true. HOWEVER, I have NOT given up, as you will see from my answers below, and I am full of positive energy and optimism for what I am now quietly advocating -- ''THE COMPASSION FOR THE FUTURE'' project -- and I hope that what I am talking about here will resonate with a few people here and there, worldwide, and am ooking forward to their feedback and ideas on this. ...........When I say a few people here and there, I mean that I do not expect what I am talking about to reach many people and I not looking for many people to follow me on this. ............Ten or twenty people might later join up with me in a loose community of like-minded people, and that is enough for my plans on this. .........So this is not for everyone, and in fact, this interview will not be for everyone, and perhaps not even for anyone at all. ........Maybe I am just speaking to myself here for now, and you, the interviewer. And that's okay. ........This is a big project but it does not need a wide net now, and I don't expect it to resonate with many people except for maybe a few forward-thinking philosophers and futurists like Roy Scranton and a few others.

Question. Why do you think your project won't reach or resonate with many people now in 2019 and the rest of the 21st century?

BLOOM: It doesn't offer anything for most people to chew on and get positive reinforcement for their lives now. Most people want solutions and fixes. The entire climate activist community and the climate scientists and philosophers who work in tandem with them, they all want political leadership and political solutions and hope for and write about "possible" technological fixes and geoengineering fixes that can save humanity from what is coming down the road.

Everyone from Katharine Hayhoe to Eric Holthaus and Nathaniel Rich and David Wallace-Wells and David "Cautionary Optimist" Roberts and Michael ''Hockey Stick'' Mann and Richard Pauli and my good friend and teacher Andy "Dot Earth" Revkin and ace essayist Kate "Courage" Marvel and Bill ''Billion ''Dollar'' Gates and Sir David "Garden of Eden is No More" Attenborough ....and 99.9  percent of all climate activists and climate scientists seek and want and crave and demand solutions and fixes and messages based on hope and optimism to realize their dream of stopping runaway global warming before it is too late. They think they have the answers, or that with time the answers and solutions and fixes will come and they therefore contiinue advocating for more positive optimistic answers. And that's cool. For them. Not for me.

Q. Not for you? What do you mean, Dan?

BLOOM: I personally don't think there are any solutions or fixes. Does this make me a gloomy doom-and-gloom doomsayer ? Not at all. I am full of postive energy 24/7 and I wake up every day full of optimism and hope for this project. Thanks for interviewing me here. ..........I expect to get one or two welcoming responses on twitter and FB and email and hundreds of mocking and angry tweets and emails and FB messages.  It's the nature of the beast. When you go out on a limb, you get slammed. When you voice to a future vision, you get attacked. I fully understand and I ready for whatever attacks people might want to launch.

Q. Was there one teacher or writer who inspired you to go down this road?

BLOOM: Yes, James Lovelock, the British chemist and co-author of the Gaia Theory of Earth. Back in 2006, he spoke quietly of all this I am speaking about now,, and I have been thinking about it all since then 24/7.

Q. Do you expect any people to join you in this effort?

BLOOM:  One or two. Not many. A handful. But over time, over the next 100 years, I fully expect this idea, this movement, to grow worldwide.For another 500 years as well.

Q. Do you expect to be attacked for these ideas here on Twitter or Facebook or by personal emails?

BLOOM. God I hope not but know how the internet works these days yes. Yes, Comes with the territory. But I won't mind the mockery, the criticisms or the angry tweets and the people who will BLOCK me on Twitter. This happens with new ideas. At first. I am fully ready for whatever comes into my mailbox or Twitter feed. But good things will happen, too.That is what I am looking for.

Q: So how exactly do you see this project moving foward?

BLOOM: Well, the people invovled, writers, poets, artists, acdemics, scholars, psychologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, futurists, science fiction experts, journalists, editors, a whole gang of people from all walks of life....a very small gang at first....we will write and prepare guides, manuals and videos and novels and poems and statements and manifestos and diary entries geared for readers in the distant future, say 100 to 200 to 300 to 400 to 500 years from now. And the point of all this is to show compassion for future generations worldwide, our descendants, so that they can better accept and adjust to what will be happening to them and their world, their environment as catastrophic runaway climate change impact events get closer and closer to them.

Question: And who will be in charge of this project..... as time goes by?

Dan: Well, I am just getting things going as  a cheerleader and a futurist. But others more expert than me in seeing into the future will take charge and I am actively looking for them now. And it will continue for the next 30 generations, like a generation ship but this generation ship will not be in outer space in some sci-fi novel or movie but right here on Earth with real people doing real work to create these materials I have outlined above.

Q: And you are serious about this?

Dan: I am.

Q: and what do you hope to achieve wth this cockamamie project?

DAN: I hope that it will serve a purpose for future generations. We shall see. If nothing else, it's  start. It's a new way to have HOPE for the future. But I don't expect most people or readers here to "get" it and want to be a part of it. I think we will need 10 years of PR and online organizing to get this project up to speed. And by then i will be 80 and most likely dead. Others will carry on. And over the next 500 years a small group will keep the flames burning. THE COMPASSION FOR THE FUTURE project has been born. Let's see what happens next.

.
SEE ALSO WHAT DR VOX aka DAVID ROBERTS was saying back in 2006

Lovelock's apocaphilia

Gaia theorist says we’re all doomed

By David Roberts on Jan 18, 2006

 

So, James Lovelock — he of the famous "Gaia Hypothesis" — has a rather, uh, grim piece in the Independent today, mainly as advance hype for his new book The Revenge of Gaia.

(The paper also has a follow-up piece that does little but point out the existence of the original piece. Oh, and another follow-up piece, doing the same. And, um, another follow-up piece, in case you missed the first three.)

I’m not really clear on what Lovelock thinks he’s trying to accomplish. Does he think people aren’t more concerned about global warming because environmentalists haven’t yelled loud enough? Haven’t been apocalyptic enough? Haven’t painted a vivid enough picture of the end of civilization? Does he think becoming even more melodramatic — "before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic" — is going to snap people awake?

I’m mystified by this attitude, which seems to be widely shared. Just shouting, louder and louder and louder, isn’t going to do anything. Lovelock’s latest piece is not going to reach anybody who’s not already sympathetic. Public opinion polls show that the majority of people believe in global warming and believe it’s human-caused and believe it’s a threat. What are they supposed to do? Panic? They need to see pathways, from where we’re standing now to a place where it will be OK. Lovelock offers no such pathways.

This kind of street-corner "the end is nigh" stuff has, in my humble opinion, largely exhausted its usefulness.

Here are some of the points:

I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.
…
We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.
…
So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent.
…
… the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.
…
So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords.