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The Great Pause Week 19: The Bridge of Khazad-dûm
Your future is a story you were told, like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
Thirty years ago The Futurist magazine named my book, Climate in Crisis, to their 1990 top ten books list. I liked that much more than when I made the Village Voice Heroes of the Revolution list because while revolutions may come and go, the passing of the Holocene will change our future like no other event in history.
In these intervening three decades, I have been forced to live, like many, as an amphibian, caught between two worlds. In the Old World people get born, go to school, become socialized to modernity, go to work and make a home, maybe have a 9-to-5 job and a 40-year mortgage, maybe pay off student loans and manage to keep their health insurance or pension, grow old if they are lucky, pay taxes and die. In the New World, few to none of those things may happen.
Perhaps you were midway through high school and looking towards college and a career. That future might be gone now. We don’t even know if the college system will survive another year. Perhaps you were…