Prologue - The Age of Consequences (7-8)

A Chronicle of the Age of Consequences __________________________________ vii

movie. As a fellow archaeologist, I knew she would understand its appeal. History is replete with Era, Ages, Periods and Revolutions - Agricultural, Industrial, Technological, and so on. Consider all the monikers that have been attached to the current epoch, including the infamous "Information Age" (infamous because it feels like we're drowning in knowledge while the world situation deteriorates). Why not the "Age of Consequences?" It sounded accurate, after all. Gen concurred and then added that she liked my idea of visiting Venice ASAP as well. "It's been a great party," she said as we climbed into the car. "Too bad it has to end sometime."

Later that summer, I took a stab at these new thoughts in an essay I wrote for The Quivira Coalition's Journal. Rather than use the phrase "Age of Consequences," however, I invented the Kunstler-ish term "Pre-postindustrialism" to describe our current era. I argued that since Industrialism is dependent on cheap oil, the end of the era of cheap oil meant we would be entering a post-industrial period. Pre-postindustrialism means we live in the 'run-up' to the coming contraction of society and therefore we should think about how to prepare for it properly.

To support my idea, I quoted futurist Lester Brown: "We are entering a new world. Of that there can be little doubt…The real question, for anyone truly concerned about our future, is not whether change is going to come, but whether the shift will be peaceful and orderly or chaotic and violent because we waited too long to begin planning for it."

I also quoted Virginia farmer and sustainable agriculture evangelist Joel Salatin, who described his farm in Michael Pollan's

The Age of Consequences ____________________________________________ viii

best-selling book The Omnivore's Dilemma as a "postindustrial enterprise," adding ominously, "You'll see."

But by October, I had changed my mind about the term.

While preparing to speak at the annual Bioneers Conference, held just north of San Francisco, I stumbled across a publication titled Ecosystems and Human Well-Being in the book store of the busy festival. It was the summary of a United Nation's project called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which had been ordered by UN Secretary General Kofi Anan to "assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and to establish the scientific basis for actions needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems and their contributions to human well-being."

I carried the book outside into the soft sunshine of a lovely California day. The Assessment took five years to complete, I read while sitting on a hay bale, and involved thousands of researchers. Its results were published in twelve publications, of which I now owned the Executive Summary. Here's a small part of what it said:

"The current demand for many ecosystem services is unsustainable," wrote the report's authors. "If current trends in ecosystem services are projected, unchanged, to the middle of the twenty-first century, there is a high likelihood that widespread constraints on human well-being will result."

That's because all people depend on the services supplied by ecosystems, either directly or indirectly. While some ecosystems are relatively healthy, significant areas of forest, cultivated land, rangelands, and coastal and marine systems are now degraded,