For the canaries in the coal mine, the first whiff of gas is no time for thanksgiving. The second will likely kill them. But the miners who notice and get the hell out give thanks for the dead canaries.

I have a liking for canaries because an eminent friend of my mother’s, the Maharani of Kutch, smuggled hers in on a visit to England but got caught when leaving, and had to give it at the airport to my mother, who gave it to me. It was the only pet I had as a child in our big religious communal house. I always felt for the canaries in the coal mines.

Are you a canary? The canary metaphor gets invoked for all the early warning types — and I imagine most Tikkun Daily readers are included in that number. Human canaries see or sense disaster coming. It’s hard to feel thankful when you are terrified that your country in all its furious energy is leading civilization more or less rapidly to destruction. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, if you are not seriously scared about global warming, world poverty, chemicals in the food chain, species extinctions, human cruelty, and human passivity in face of such problems, then you will have an easier time tomorrow at Thanksgiving than the rest of us.

In this gruesome canary metaphor, the equivalent of the miners — the people today who are just going about business as usual — will not end up being grateful to us canaries if we just expire from fear or burnout. Fortunately for us it’s not our deaths that will help. And it’s not just our ability to sniff the air and foresee possible doom that will help.

If we are accurate and our predictions are well researched, then of course our warnings will be invaluable. But of all the people since Malthus who saw doom coming, most have not been thanked for being canaries so much as mocked for being Chicken Littles. The sky has indeed fallen quite a few times, in genocides, wars and economic collapses, but for most people, believe it or not, life has got better over the last two centuries, at least in terms of material life and longevity of life.

Have the would-be canaries, the doomsters, been wrong that a commercially driven civilization powered by scientifically derived technology in the hands of efficiency experts would be unsustainable? How soon will we know? Predictions vary. Unsustainability isn’t a single event. For the species already extinct and the 24,000 children dying each day of preventable diseases it has already happened. I’m not laying bets on when a majority of the US population, for example, will realize that our economic model of unlimited growth and of Mother Nature as endless cornucopia is pure fantasy. I’m impressed by how the dooms I feared when I was in my twenties have not materialized on the timelines I then expected.

Prediction is a risky business and commercial civilization has so far proven more adaptable than most progressives expected. A great part of this adaptability is due to the work of the progressives themselves. Life has got better for so many people because many measures of democracy were achieved, and this enabled legislatures to pass laws to provide for universal education and even health care (in most rich nations but ours) and social security, and workplace, food and product safety, etc. A huge amount of environmental clean-up has been done. Dead rivers have come back to life. Eco-laws have been passed — because some measure of the democracy that progressives created down the centuries does survive — and have even been enforced, because there are many decent people in law enforcement and city water departments and so on, and all is not yet sold to the highest bidder.

Yes, these things have helped capitalism to survive and flourish, but you can bet that without progressives agitating for them the profit-motivated would not have been farseeing enough to pass them. Capitalists in charge can be incredibly myopic and dumb, even about their own interests. An FDR, who manages to fight almost the entire business establishment to pass enough progressive legislation to save the country from revolution and capitalism from itself, is a rarity. Most patricians and moneymen aren’t that smart: viz. the lot in charge now.

Can progressives generate these kinds of piecemeal reforms on a scale large enough to save the whole civilization, and steer it gradually away from the current model towards a biologically sane economy?

I don’t know. But it sure won’t happen if we don’t keep our spirits high, our energy up, and our brains working. And if we are constantly dwelling on the negatives, the predicted dooms, and the vast scale of the problems, we will have a very hard time doing what we need to do.

Thanks to all the climate change activists! Here in Shanghai, at one of over 5,200 events around the world on Oct 24, 2009 for the International Day of Climate Action. More at www.350.org

That’s where a conscious practice of gratitude comes in. Without joy in being alive, in the beauty of this world, and constant reminders of all we have to be thankful for, how do we avoid burnout?

And ultimately, the fact is that we are not trying to replace uber-materialist values with less materialist caring values just so that our civilization can survive and our great-grandchildren will thank us. We are trying to do it because we are learning where joy in life comes from, for ourselves, now. The most powerful antidote to the desire for a bigger bank balance and a bigger house and car is not the fear that down the road at some point it will be ecologically unsustainable. It is that working for each others’ welfare, creating caring communities, giving and loving, facing and solving problems together, providing for basic needs of food and shelter, are actually more satisfying ways to live than being the fastest rat in a ratrace.

So yes, if you truly are fearful about the future as I am, then help me remember that my own joy in life and your own joy in life are the road forward.

And tomorrow and every day let us give thanks for this stunningly beautiful world, and for all the ways people care for each other and the living beings around us. And I want to especially give thanks for all the activists who have struggled to build institutions of democracy and law that have enabled even partial successes for campaigns for freedom from torture, disease, hunger, destitution in old age, food poisoning, discrimination and the many cruelties we humans deliberately or thoughtlessly visit on each other and our ecosystems. Thanks to all the canaries who saw the disasters in progress or down the road. And thanks to them for not expiring on the spot, literally or metaphorically. But thanks for their lives and activism and courage, hope, energy, joy and faith. I could go on to give thanks for all those people who built spiritual communities that have fed these activists’ faith and hope and love, but I have written enough. Thanks for reading this far.