My portfolio

This is very much a work-in-progress, your comments would be greatly appreciated.

I am Ari Gold, I am riding my bicycle around the world. People ask me why am I doing that, it is hard to express my reasons.

I want MEMORIES worth living for when all I have are memories. I want to experience other ways of life I greatly enjoy but barely know about. The museums, architecture, food, music, accents, clothing, belief systems, societies and interactions of people all fascinate me and excite my curiosity.

SUSTAINABILITY AND RESPONSIBILITY. The life, the world I know are coming to an end. Many more people are alive today than ever before. There is less land for crops, grazing and wilderness because people live on that land. That land could produce food, medicine, wood, cloth or clean air. Highly industrialized countries and cultures such as mine use tremendous amounts of resources. We make token gestures addressing these inequities and life-threatening conundrums.

I want to learn about other ways of life, sustainable lifestyles, sane ways of living. Our culture is big and moving fast. There's a lot of momentum and inertia in our cultural path. We are not changing fast enough to avoid a violent end to our excessive ways. I do not want to be in the shadow of our empires when they collapse. I am seeking and experimenting with alternatives.

I can't change our highly industrialized ways but I do not have to be such an active participant. I feel GUILTY using 'modern conveniences'. My cell phone and laptop are always by my side. Almost every item and aspect of American life is harmful to me, you, everybody and everything on the planet, including future generations. The manufacture, use of and disposal of plastics, metals, composites, electronics, and paper involve extremely toxic poisons. Most living organisms are adversely effected by the way we in the highly industrialized cultures go through our lives. I believe we can have our toys AND not damage our world. I believe what is needed is for us to change our focus from having our toys to healing our world. How do you think that would that change things?

If not damaging the environment is so important to our governments and industries then why is re-establishing the natural balance not so important? We, all humanity, need to become forest rangers, bringing about a naturally sustainable, HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT that does not need our supervision. Without us such a thing will occur naturally but we would have to be dead first -"without us". If we are going to stay in the picture we need to act fast.

The solution I imagine is the people who want or need to do things that harm the environment will go off-planet, starting with manufacturing sites clustered around the international space station and moving on to free-floating asteroids, moons and planets. The only people on Earth will be either restoring a natural, sustainable balance or working with that natural environment. The only other kind of people on Earth will be seen as rebels and criminals. The ones on earth will need to provide for the ones in space until the spacers can support themselves. This sounds like science fiction to me but so does the international space station, laser surgery, cyclotrons and nuclear reactors.

If there is intelligent life on other planets I do not want our history to be an object lesson to them when they discover us – the result of shortsighted mismanagement of resources.