What Are We Doing?

Over the last couple of years, Katherine and I have been less and less frequently found at our usual haunts. Where, then, are we? And what the hell are we doing?

The short answer is we’re trying to travel more, mostly by boat, and situate ourselves in a less anthropocentric nook of this Anthropocene era. We’re attempting to learn to prepare and pilot a sailboat to at least somewhat remote locations. And this is a way to share the log of those efforts, voyages, and the reflections they feed. 

The long answer is more complex and less resolved. Humans of pretty much every era in history have been self-centered and short-sighted enough to believe they are living in times of unprecedented change and threat. So with the caveat that I likely typify the condition of my species, I suggest we—the greater we—are well out of balance and significant upheaval is ahead. 

There is little doubt about major shifts in what has been a somewhat stable global order for the last 80 years or so, and the tsunami pace of AI is nothing if not a wild card in an already volatile concoction. These factors, in conflagration with climate ramifications that are no longer avoidable, declare to me the path forward contains high potential for instability. 

So Katherine and I have gone to find those frequencies that resist radio tuners, to tunnel below television, usurp URLs, soften the seduction of social media, and try to develop the senses to feel around the edges of another perspective, where intuition and the unexplained can be more provocative than the daily infotainment doom feed. 

Are we abdicating responsibilities to community? Recreating in the apocalypse? Fiddling while Rome burns? Maybe. But we are finite in this form and the world is too beautiful to total out this temporal tryst consumed by the blinders and balustrades of late-stage capitalism, collapsing social orders, and the whimsy of hubristic billionaires.

We also, obviously, are not wholly eschewing connectivity and interactions with the greater world. As charming as the idea of disappearing into the bush (or the expansive ocean) might occasionally be, we do have friends, family, work, and legal obligations to tend to. The friends and family, at least, we are not willing to surrender.

Speaking for myself, I want to be wedged into a few challenging scenarios hard to come by in the current cultural cloak of normalcy. At this moment in time, I have the free agency to experience some wild places, hopefully before such travel becomes even more chaotic and unpredictable, and while I have the strength, agility, and stamina for adversity and discomfort. 

The sailboat feels right because it minimizes dependence on fossil fuels and offers potential access to many borders. It requires surrendering concrete destinations, disavowing rigid schedules, and becoming intimate with water and weather. It means reckoning frankly with one’s own consumption and waste and living as much as possible within a self-contained and striving-toward-sustainable machine.

Travel by sailboat means being physically and mentally engaged with your travel. I want to leverage this engagement to challenge my resourcefulness and resilience and, frankly, to confront and absorb the human and industrial impacts on some of the wild and beautiful places of the planet.

I’m trying to learn new skills that invigorate my brain and body, and to take advantage of—rather than squander—any privilege and good fortune I have. 

I want to be forced to find balance in order to make progress, which is really the only way to operate a sailboat, but I’m hopeful something analogous can worm its way into my sense of being, and lodge as a useful damper on my busy, sometimes anxious mind. 

If there is something I love more than an expansive view of the sea from the land, it might be the inverse: a big, unwieldy view of the land from out on the water.

Clearly, I’m imbuing this thing with enough romance that I’m bound to suffer the consequences of some razor-edged reality checks. I can imagine plenty of pitfalls, some fairly dramatic and nerve-wracking, such as rogue state bad actors, expanding war and conflict zones, renewed nuclear testing, closed borders, more pandemics, increased piracy, killer drones operated by a misguided super-intelligence, etc. But what I’m most likely to encounter is my own limitations in the face of routine challenges: weather, mechanical and equipment failure, limited access to resources, stress, illness or other health challenges, a lack of resolve, and/or discovering a propensity for violent, uncontrollable seasickness. 

A shifting climate cannot be denied by reasonable people. And even reasonable people are understandably reluctant to come to grips with it. Everywhere I go, folks are always saying things like “There’s usually more snow on the mountains this time of year” or “It’s not typically this hot in May,” comforting mantras of a perceived normal that is no more. The strong El Niño cycle of 2026/27 has already demonstrated the highest heat levels ever recorded by humans in the Pacific Ocean and coral reefs are bleaching at stunning rates. Sea birds along the west coast of the Americas have a significant likelihood of being hit with a mass die-off, the second in a dozen years for many species. In my home base of New Mexico forests, and the plants and animals that live inside them, are being ravaged by drought.

Humanity has raced through seven out of nine previously established “climate boundaries” like there was a prize to collect for getting there faster. In order to genuinely meet these challenges, our human systems need to be operating at peak performance and international collaboration, but many of our democracies are in dysfunction, with failing infrastructure, broken institutions, and social contracts largely rendered meaningless.

Artificial Intelligence represents a weightless, mercurial behemoth in the room, with potential near-term outcomes that are vexingly unknowable but startlingly unrestrained. The only thing we can count on is that governments and corporations are going to be unable to come together with anything resembling unity to find mutually acceptable guard rails and regulation to control this evolving thing. Even if some kind of international summit is convened and achieved, what are the odds of the results being effective or lasting? Meanwhile, ecological and climate systems don’t notice or care whether or not we’re able to take ownership or action. Those systems do what they do, responding to inputs and stimuli, in the most natural way possible.

I have friends and family well to the right on the political spectrum who see conspiracies everywhere but don’t have much of a problem with the status quo of contemporary society, outside of their susceptibility to grievance politics. I have friends and family on the left who see conspiracies everywhere and demand radical action to shatter the status quo, but don’t really have practicable solutions for navigating a systemic dismantling and a capable refit. I have centrist friends who see conspiracies nowhere and imagine the next election can turn things around and get us set down a sensible path. "Golly," we'll soon be saying by their reckoning, "that was a weird time."

We all have our blind spots. Most days I feel like I have more than my fair share.

So we’re trying to get some distance, capture a view through new refractions, start seeing some things with more clarity and stop focusing so doggedly on others. I’m going to do my best to write about it here. 

I’ll leave you with more eloquent summaries of what we're doing and why from the late, great Wendell Berry....

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

And that other under-appreciated bard of adversity, Tank Girl....