Evolution is a popularity contest

When you walk into a store or other public place that has music playing over a sound system, you have to listen to it. You may be distracted enough not to notice it consciously, or you may find it inescapably intrusive. Or you might even enjoy it. And it changes you. Like it or not, because the popular hits soundtrack is so ubiquitous, you will have songs that autoplay in your head when you hear the first three notes. Regardless, you have to go through the experience with everyone else in that environment, because someone, somewhere, determined that music in public places was the more popular choice.

Think of the mass of humanity's environmental and social choices the same way. If everyone else set themselves on fire, would you set yourself on fire? You might prefer not to, but you will still have to breathe in the stench of charring flesh. And one or more of the happy incendiaries might careen into you and set you ablaze against your wishes.

In the USA, some percentage of people are unquestionably law abiding, and another percentage are automatically resistant to, and defiant of, any authority. In between lies the greatest number, fluctuating between the poles of obedience and defiance as they analyze each situation they happen to notice. A lot of us are oblivious to larger implications most of the time. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when we should have been paying attention to the first bits of debris leading up to the avalanche of deferred consequences our species now faces, the Baby Boomers were focused instead on the basics of life: finding paying work, establishing homes, reproducing. Even the politically savvy tended mostly to view it from a personal perspective, multiplied through an uncounted legion of their theoretical allies who would all benefit if a particular policy made things better for one of them. It's hard to imagine a life very different from one's own. You really have to go try it out. Even the most detailed book or movie can't drag you right in and trap you in it. Interactive video games may come close. I don't know, because I have never tried one. As detailed as they may be, every single thing that happens in one was created by the mind of someone else and is known to them.

Believers in an almighty deity say that the simulation we think of as real life is also the product of a creator to whom everything is known. That really takes the fun out of it. I see how the notion can be comforting, but it's also limiting in more ways than moral strictures and mandatory rituals.

Now that the Teachable Moment has come, environmentally, we find that a substantial portion of the class wants to act up. Look at the scorn and ridicule that greeted California's plastic straw ban. Read the back -- and sometimes all sides -- of a truck or van belonging to a really jacked-up paranoid who sees threats to sacred liberty in every admonition to throttle back and lighten up. You won't have to wait long to see some sentiment that will make you want to retire to a cave and live with the few surviving animals.

In the 1980s I had the same vision that I have today: we could use the grid for good as much as ill. Convenience is not a sin. But conveniences required adjustment to keep them from becoming the engines of global destruction that they eventually did. And eventually was pretty rapidly, because moderation was scorned and ridiculed.

The slogan in the 1980s was "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." It was the golden age of the loaded roof rack, when Yakima and Thule products on the roof of your increasingly large vehicle needed to be locked securely. More than once we heard from friends who had made a day or evening jaunt into a city, only to find their roof rack stripped of every unlocked accessory. We were Recreation Nation, and anything related to the popular activities had really good street value. My attempt to steer that behemoth hinged on trying, through my published writings and in my day jobs, at least to get more people thinking about doing it without internal combustion. Try to get an appreciation of nature to sneak up on them, because Americans -- and probably most humans -- are very resistant to confrontational change. We love confrontation, but only to demonstrate how we can stick to our original position until it kills us. Think of the Confederacy.

I'm approaching a deadline for my quarterly environmental cartoon. The cartoon has been increasingly hard to draw because so many great causes make poor subjects for a single panel image. And I have realized the uselessness of mockery. Humor will only work on someone already inclined to agree with it. The inclination may be deeply buried, unknown to its owner, but it has to be there. Are the few who seem to be awakened worth the stiffened resolve of the outraged opposition?

I don't mind preaching to the choir. It keeps morale up. But nothing seems funny. The extent of the problems that begin with simple individual choices and multiply instantly to a global epidemic, like air pollution or the proliferation of plastic is better served by animation and real video, compressing the sequence of events into a much more visceral revelation of the ugly truth.

One of the hardest things to get used to when you're out there riding a bike and trying to live a low impact life is finding out how many people hate you for it and think you should die. It doesn't have to be the majority. You only have to encounter one homicidal jerk. That's true whether you get tagged by a hit and run driver or you happen to be at the mall the day one of them shows up and opens fire.

Less dramatic and more deadly is the steady accumulation of pollution and degradation by one individual at a time, repeated across a global population in the billions. The system that has evolved funnels gains to a small number of dominant apes, requiring that the lesser apes -- regardless of good intentions -- play some form of the game just to survive. The lifestyle is as inescapable as the music in a department store. It touches every place on this small planet. "Pristine" places are not pure because they are out of reach. We could strip mine the Himalaya, and eventually we probably will.

A lucky break and some chilling thoughts

When my house was broken into a couple of weeks ago, the investigating officer left his card and said I should call if I noticed anything that could help the investigation. I had little hope that the investigation would yield anything, but I did call when I noticed that a flashlight I kept near the front door had been stolen. It was a PeliLght Submersible light that I had used for kayaking. I had exchanged parts between this orange light and a black one of the same type, giving the light a distinctive appearance.

Three days later, I got a call back. Cooperating law enforcement agencies in several communities on either side of the Maine-New Hampshire border have been working on the burglary epidemic for months. They had just managed to catch and arrest a couple leaving the scene of another burglary in the next town to the north, which led investigators to a stash of loot in a town about 30 miles to the south. Among the identifiable items they recovered was my funky flashlight.

I may never see any of my stuff again. Some may have been sold or bartered. Some may have been tossed as worthless in the thief and drug addict economy. Recovered items will have to serve as evidence for an undetermined length of time. But it's nice to know that someone has officially connected names and faces to the crime.

Effingham's police chief told me that opioid users in this area may be living in the woods. Items stolen are often bartered directly for drugs, or used for survival. Thus the Gerber knife, the flashlight, and the binoculars taken from my house might go directly to support an encampment, wherever it might be.

Guess I'll have to go armed when I go bushwhacking now. What a drag. Fortunately, I do most of that in the winter, when snow will reveal the tracks of any forest dwellers. I already dress in muted colors. This may give me a better chance of seeing them before they see me.

What a thing to have to worry about. I think about it on the night commute, too. I'm riding along, brightly lit, a movable feast of useful and salable items on a deserted forest path. The illuminated person is the one at risk in the darkness. I've toyed with contingency plans for years. Now they seem more realistic. How do I escape? How quickly can I shuck reflective items, to blend with the darkness and escape or counterattack? I load my bike and personal pack with this in mind. I want my phone, a weapon, and one light in my possession, ready to run when I abandon the lighted bike and use it as bait. How I respond after that depends on how many assailants gather, and how badass they look. Certainly an open line to 911 is first. Then use the darkness myself to observe the enemy.

Probably nothing will ever happen. But you can't predict what a jonesing addict might think is a good idea. And the average lifespan of an opioid addict after the onset of addiction is 15 to 20 years. They don't instantly turn into frail twigs hovering at the edge of death. They may be sturdy, muscular people who have turned all their energy toward acquiring more of their chemical best friend by any means necessary. Whether they are truly bad or good is immaterial, if they are opportunistic, and driven by a craving.`

The path was my refuge for the night commute. If I leave it to ride the road, I'm exposed to narrow, rural highways in the darkness. That not only adds the possibility of a collision with an inattentive driver, it may increase the chance of being picked off by a "shopper" who would not have seen me if I was not right there on the public right of way.

All this is no more true than it was before I was aware of it. The opioid crisis has been building for several years. But any kind of personal contact with the effects of the crisis makes it more real. Is danger a reason not to do something worthwhile? Of course not. But new dangers add new elements to be managed.

In case you think something is too trivial to attract a miscreant's attention, consider the shaving kits: I had marveled that the thieves had taken mine when it contained nothing I thought they would want. I reckoned they had snatched it just because it might contain prescription drugs, and that they would toss it as soon as they had time to look in it. Nope. The investigating officer called to ask me to describe my shaving kit, because the people they arrested had a bunch of them. In light of that, and because you do hear about riders on urban paths getting mugged for their bikes, I figure it's only a matter of time before the light bulb comes on over some dirtbag's head around here, and they try to pick off a lone rider in a secluded setting.

Ideas like this reinforce people's idea that they are safer in their swift-moving armored vehicles than they are on a slow, wobbly bicycle. The fact that they would be safest of all on foot, efficiently but lightly armed, does not fit most people's work schedule and world view. I'm certainly not going to start hiking to work with a side arm and a medium-length blade. Not yet, anyhow. Ask me again in a couple of years, when the social order has collapsed because of disastrous economic policies and fully unleashed xenophobia. But at that point I will probably be self-employed and working from home. Or I will already have been killed while defending one or another of my less mainstream friends from the aforementioned xenophobia.

We have so much to look forward to in the exciting future created by at least 30 years of ignoring what were once soluble problems. Or maybe -- unprecedented though it may be in all of human existence -- our species will finally have that long, deep talk that we've fought countless wars and squandered millions of lives to avoid.