What We Can Learn from the Life of Ray Bradbury

It’s the birthday of Ray Bradbury, who told us, “I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”  This specter of Soviet totalitarianism in the middle of the 20th Century had given rise to a great number of high-impact dystopian novels, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was an important contribution to this genre. 

Per his quote above, the author believed he was playing a critical role in diverting society from a catastrophic course.  Yet there were some people at the time who criticized Bradbury on a number of different fronts. Some thought him arrogant and self-indulgent, in that he believed that he, a single person with a typewriter, was capable of changing the course of an entire civilization.  Others called him quixotic, a hopeless idealist whose utopian vision of the world could never be realized. The largest group of critics categorized him as an alarmist, raising unnecessary fear in a world that would have continued on an even course without him.

Seventy years later, there are still people whose life’s work are an attempt to “prevent the future.”  The threat of world fascism certainly hasn’t gone away, but now it’s joined by different sorts of dangers, including, of course, wide-scale environmental destruction.

The funny/tragic part is that, while there are an estimated 100 million people who daily work for the preservation and restoration of life on earth, there are probably just as many who claim that our work is quixotic, idealistic, utopian, and unrealistic, who sneer that civilization did just fine before we got here, and will be just as fine after we’re gone. This is simply the cross that environmentalists have to bear. Closing note: We’re OK with that.