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.
Looking back, the long writing process seems to have been guided by some kind of unconscious instinct. When the monster finally came out of the womb, I was pleasantly surprised. The generic version of the human saga taught in education factories typically focuses on just the 12,000-year window spanning from agriculture and civilization to today’s eight billion planet smashing maniacs (brilliant technological geniuses). But, for most of the two-million-year human saga, we were more like wild, rugged, and primitive animals. The book presents us with a humbler look in the mirror — warts and all.
Download your copy here.
Author
Richard Reese lives in Eugene, Oregon. His primary interest is ecological sustainability, and helping others learn about it. He is the author of What Is Sustainable, Sustainable or Bust, and Understanding Sustainability and is currently working on a new book titled Wild, Free & Happy. Reese' blog wildancestors.blogspot.com includes free access to reviews of more than 196 sustainability-related books by a variety of authors both contemporary and historical, plus a few dozen of his own rants. More about the author
