for the past two centuries - including Thomas Jefferson's famous "pursuit of happiness," will largely be put on hold now while we attended to these emergencies. I suspect we'll be tending to them for a very long time.
In 1960, when I was born, crisis management of this sort was decidedly NOT on the nation's To Do list. We were still on a post-war high. The vehicle called Civilization was picking up speed and the road ahead looked like clear sailing. All systems were 'go.' America was trying to get a man to the moon, of all things, and I remember the shiver of thrill I felt at each televised moon-shot. Sure, there were rumors of trouble - a messy foreign war, discontent on the home front, problems with our rivers and our air - but they seemed fixable and transitory. Things would inevitably get better again, as they always had in the past. Climate change? It was barely a gleam in some professor's eye.
Now, 1960 seems infinitely far away. The tranquility and hopefulness of that era has been replaced with the insistent clanging of alarm bells and periodic bouts of gloominess. We race now, as a nation, from emergency to emergency, hoping, praying to find a way to turn those damn alarm bells off.
What happened? How did we get from there to here? And where are we going exactly? I suspect that nobody knows. I don't. That's the problem with crisis management, you can't make plans. You become reactive, and anxious. Eventually you become scared.
When the fifth warning light went off in the speeding dashboard, I decided to keep an official record. In choosing to create a chronicle of the Age of Consequences, I aim at two goals:
first, to bear witness to this important moment in human history - for I suspect that Wes Jackson is correct in his assessment of our situation; and second, to attempt to explain to subsequent generations why we did what we did, or didn't do.
So, on Earth Day, 2008, I began this project. It's only my perspective on events - nothing else. My fondest hope is that my children will read it someday, and perhaps their children too, and that it will help them understand a sequence of events that undoubtedly will be affecting their lives. Perhaps it will also help them solve what to me looks like an unanswerable riddle. The riddle being: why?
I'll try my best to help. Meanwhile, I'm still planning to see Venice.
