Dear Friends and Colleagues,
October 20, 2021
I am pleased to announce that I have achieved a long-time goal: I have cleared my decks of all executive and administrative obligations! As of yesterday, I resigned my presidency at Ocean Alliance and relinquished all of my responsibilities there.
I am excited about this next chapter, and although I am no longer associated with or work for Ocean Alliance, I wish my former colleagues there all the best. I look forward to continuing to share my work and passion with all of you.
This is a change I have sought for some time, because It will allow me to focus whatever energy, time, and resources I have left on the main goal of my life: attempting to learn how to protect whales and their ocean environment through scientific research, while encouraging my fellow scientists to speak out publicly more often and with greater urgency about the critical need for massive changes in what we humans are doing to Nature. I will also exercise my belief that although science offers essential information about what changes are needed, the routes that lead to the fastest changes often pass through other parts of our culture. My new freedom will enable me to spend time working to catalyze collaborations between science, activism, and the creative arts.
One of my principal mentors, Donald Griffin, was a great coiner of words (‘echolocation’ is the best-known example). My favorite Griffinism was his term for the moment when a ‘senior’ scientist like me pumps up enough courage to finally accept the importance of daring to combine what they know from life and art with what they know from scientific proofs and observations: He referred to that moment as; “reaching one’s philosophopause.” Well, so be it then. And long overdue, say I.
It seems highly likely that the changes we so desperately need will only come by invoking emotions, and that is something that poets, musicians, writers, playwrights, sculptors, painters, dancers, composers—in fact, creative people of every stripe do well, but that scientists do at their peril. For the real challenge here is to get the world to fall so deeply in love with Nature that we will no longer tolerate the destruction of creation, and will risk our careers and our lives to save all plankton, mosses, ferns, trees, flowers, jellyfish, crinoids, nautiloids, crabs, bees, butterflies, beetles, squid, fishes, frogs, turtles, birds, and mammals—in other words, we will fight to save all of the non-human “Other.”
But although Science can tell us what needs doing, people in the creative arts know more about how to get it done—how to elicit the emotions that can lead us to act—how to go beyond the numbers and the data to create the passions that are necessary to trigger the changes that can reshape this waning world. All of the great movements in human history have been based not on data but on emotion and passion and a dream of a better society and a better life. For unless people connect emotionally with a problem they won’t connect with the numbers and the data that describe its dimensions.
It is now time for my fellow scientists and me to acknowledge the bitter truth of something we all recognize right down to our bones: that the time has come… is upon us… is all over us… is shouting at us from every quarter, telling us to set aside our security, our dreams, and to spend every waking moment of our lives working like the hammers of hell—working to change all human behaviors that are contributing to the destruction of life, and to change them right down to their deepest roots.
There is nothing more important that any of us can do than to rise in protest against the nonsensical belief that no matter how serious our mistakes, we can engineer our way out of them. The ‘invincibility’ of the human future is a fatal fantasy, and unless we act in protest and with all our energy, in everything we do or say or act or depict of write or sign or create… life on earth will have no future; we will have no future; our children will have no future; other complex life forms will have no future; and our fatal ignorance will knock life on this beautiful planet back to something resembling the earliest multicellular forms from the Precambrian era.
Or worse.
The age of innocence is over. The age of action is here. It is time to focus our attention on doing what really matters.
My new website is RogerPayne.com. From now on, please email me at: Roger@RogerPayne.com. As always, I will continue to welcome hearing from you and sharing my news.
With warmest regards, and with hopes that you will join me as I beat to windward on this final tack,
Roger Payne