[Note: This post is sample 65, of Wild Free & Happy, the last in the series. It provides instructions for obtaining a free digital copy of the entire finished manuscript.]
Finally
Finished!
Greetings! I’m
delighted to finally announce the official release of a writing project I’ve
been working on for 25+ years. Wild Free & Happy
explores our long and bumpy relationship with the family of life. It spans from our ancient tree dwelling
ancestors to the rowdy mob of eight billion outside our windows today.
The mainstream mindset typically presents the big history
epic from a humanist perspective. We are
the greatest! We’re living in a
wonderland of astonishing progress. We
proudly celebrate the glorious rise of civilizations, empires, industries,
progress, technology, human brilliance, etc.
Stuff keeps getting better and better, and the best is yet to come!
That’s what I was taught in classrooms 60 years ago. It’s what my parents were taught 90 years
ago. It’s probably what today’s students
are still expected to memorize and regurgitate.
The embarrassing portions of the human saga are mostly shoved into our
monster closet and forgotten.
Today, the humanist faith is being roughed up by a heresy
called realism. Yesterday, there were
8.2 billion of us, the population meter keeps spinning, and the warning klaxons
are flashing and screaming. Ruthless
power-hungry strong men are popping up around the world like mushrooms after an
autumn rain, spilling rivers of blood.
We live in interesting times.
The planet is rocking and rolling with unusually devastating
storms, heat waves, wildfires, floods.
The climate is warming, glaciers are melting, oceans are
acidifying. Extinctions, deforestation,
soil destruction… Don’t worry! Solutions are on the way (and will be
massively profitable for investors).
Experts have everything under control.
For me, Wild
Free & Happy has evolved into something like a sacred quest, my
calling. I graduated from high school a
few weeks after the first Earth Day in 1970.
It was an era when there were minimal controls on industrial pollution,
and the consequences were horrid. By the
1990s, my attention was focused on environmental issues.
I spent lots of time reading, writing, and conversing
online. Among the dreamers of those days
were many fans of Daniel Quinn’s books — all we needed to do was drop out, form
tribes, hug trees, and the balance would be restored. Um, a beautiful idea, but....
Back in 2004, I used Wild Free & Happy as the title of a
91-page experiment. It appealed to the
optimistic magical thinking of that era.
Now, in 2024, that title suggests what we have lost and forgotten.
The Earth Crisis is a predicament, not a problem. Problems have solutions, predicaments have
outcomes. Overshoot is a predicament,
and it’s outcome is some sort of yucky process that returns humankind’s
eco-impacts to a level within the carrying capacity of the planet. This will not be fun and easy.
In 2011, I launched a blog
to share my rants and book reviews with a larger audience. By 2018, I was posting rough draft sample
chapters of Wild Free
& Happy, and the project was picking up steam. The blog has now had more than 899,000 views,
and should pass a million in January 2025.
In 2021, I proudly announced that my book project was close
to the finish line, ready to launch in just a few more weeks. Wrong!
My hungry brain kept discovering more and more amazing information —
important missing pieces that strongly boosted the potency of the reading
experience.
Now it’s 2024, my brains are tattered, and it’s time to
release my literary monsterpiece. The
last thing I want to do is spend two or three years finding a publisher. I don’t need money. I’m an extremely frugal bicycle riding
car-free wordsmith, and Social Security and Medicare take excellent care of me.
Our loony culture strongly expects us to shop till we drop,
and devote our lives to hoarding status trinkets. It utterly fails to educate society on
environmental history, and respect and reverence for the family of life. Ignorance is an expensive pathogen.
Consequently, most folks have little or no interest in
voluntarily making radical changes in order to reduce the impacts of their
lifestyles. Big Mama Nature doesn’t care
what our preferences are. She will do
what needs to be done, ready or not.
My secret plan is to release this book to the world, in
digital form, at no cost, to encourage folks to share it with others, and hope
that it might slow down our war on the future a bit. Printed books cost money, and many folks
don’t have $30 or more to spare for a non-necessity. Many folks in many places don’t have credit
cards and/or convenient access to parcel delivery services.
My free digital book can be downloaded with the click of a
mouse, and easily shared with friends and family. It’s intended to be fairly easy to read for
older teens. An additional benefit is that
it’s full of many hyperlinks to additional information, for readers eager to
learn as much as possible. On the
downside, hyperlinks have limited working lifespans. This manuscript has been evolving for
years. So, expect to find dead
links. It’s often possible to find these
links via the Internet Wayback Machine (web.archive.org)
I’ll release the book as a Microsoft Word document. As needed, it can be converted to other file
formats — PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Kobo, etc.
If folks with websites want to make my book available for
folks to download, great! I would prefer
not to be the world’s only distribution hub.
My library limits online access to one-hour segments. I don’t want to be the main hub.
Eco-organizations (Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, etc.)
could inform their supporters about the book, and maybe provide downloads.
From time to time I hear news of social media sites where
stuff can suddenly go viral, and reach a huge audience. Magicians known as influencers can encourage
surges of interest. All I know is
Facebook.
My book’s three big assets are (1) the immense number of
sources. I’ve been doing the research
for 25+ years, read 600+ books, and countless papers, articles, and
websites. (2) It’s designed for folks
who have a serious interest in learning.
Lots of hyperlinks, and a generous bibliography. (3) I wasn’t working to generate rent money,
so I was free to invest lots of time and take deep dives into fascinating side
trips.
OK! If you want a
copy, send a note to richardadrianreese@gmail.com (not FB Messenger). Please feel free to share the book with
others.
