"It's time to get in touch with our inner ant," Anderson cautions, "to be more artisan-enterpriser and less prospector-speculator, more heroic Greatest Generation and less self-indulgent baby boomer, to return from Oz to Kansas, to become fully reality-based again."

The key to the future, he believes, is the so-called Millennial generation – young adults who came of age during a time defined by the digital revolution, 9/11, financial bubbles bursting, recession, and the election of Barack Obama. According to Andersen, these events comprise "the making, frankly, of a healthier, more useful generational creation myth than assassinations, antiwar protests and countercultural bacchanalia (which, by the way, enabled the risk-taking, party-hearty, quasi-utopian paradigm of the past quarter-century)."

Andersen is hopeful because he sees the events that shaped the Millennial generation as a catalyst for important new development: the idea of sustainability. Business-as Usual is not an option for an increasing number of young people today, he concludes.

In other words, as we stand at the fork in the road caused by the end of the Fiesta, the Millennials are likely to be the ones to boldly go where their parents fear to tread.

My hope is that they do.