Prologue

The Age of Consequences

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period…" – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

This project was born on a sunny summer day in 2006 when I stepped out of a movie theater with my wife into the warm embrace of a lazy afternoon.

Gen and I had finally found a convenient time to see former vice-president Al Gore's inconvenient documentary on global warming, with its dire warnings of environmental and social turmoil ahead if we maintained Business-As-Usual. Like millions of others, we were unnerved by what we saw. I was especially disturbed by the graphic images of rising sea water snaking through the streets of Manhattan, Shanghai and other low-lying cities around the globe. As we stepped off the curb into the parking lot, blinking in the bright sunlight after the movie, I quipped to Gen "We'd better get to Venice, Italy, quick."

Although I didn't know it at the time, the idea for this chronicle had taken root.

Climate change wasn't exactly news to us – my work as a conservationist, first with a local Chapter of the Sierra Club then as a co-founder of a nonprofit organization dedicated to building bridges between ranchers,  environmentalists  and  others  around