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TODAY Friday 22 May 1998 Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Friday 22 May 1998 Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
THE YEAR ON THE SITE: That Which Matters
I gotta go, readers. There's this new job (Citizens Union of the City of New York, citizens@citizesunion.org), and I have to give it all. Liberty Tree must hibernate for a while, until Denis Hayes and the good people at Earth Day 2000 decide how best to fold Lib Tree into their own Web strategy. Your ideas, which Denis seeks, can be sent to him at dhayes@bullitt.org.
Already I miss Liberty Tree so much I can't bear to go back to the office and fetch my books. The Liberty Tree office occupied the prime corner of the twelth floor of a 1904 warehouse building in the cheap perfume and counterfeit T-shirt section of New York's Garment District. Light floods through tall windows that open. The cross ventilation and the overhead fans allow you to work without air conditioning while you waste time staring at examples of the Golden Age of American commercial architecture. In the lobby and elevators you met the world. I was the only male of North European Christian descent, and I developed the New Yorker's sentimental pride in his unsentimental cosmopolitanism.
Which is one reason why a New York-focused job makes sense now. Another is that the pay is decent and the health insurance assured. Lib Tree, God bless it, rarely knew a fiscally unanxious month. You get tired.
Besides, human density is good, environmentally speaking, and helping cities is one of our movement's main tasks. Urban people occupy less space, burn less fuel, and consume fewer resources than their suburban compatriots. That there should be a much slower growth in human numbers gets no argument here; but cities can be good places to put 'em while we figure out how to save as much of Nature as we can.
And I do think it can be "figured out," though I don't think so with great confidence. In the end, optimism is an historical duty. I line up as a wisecracking, captious NCO in the old brigade that believes that the best way out of the climate change crisis and the deforestation crisis and the endocrine system crisis -- the sub-parts of the overall Crisis of Extinction -- is to subject them to analysis and then to take steps. So sue me. This much I know: there is some deep love between humans and nature, and the love moves through time and through space over immense distances, even to the point that the immense distances circle back on themselves to the here and now.
Recent "Today" columns:
4/2: A Short History and Future of this Website
4/1: Larip Sofolyad
3/31: Lost At Sea in the Year of the Ocean
3/30: Environmentalism for Grown-Ups
3/27: Kyoto? Nice Town. Oh, You Mean the Treaty!!
3/26: Hungary
3/25: Solidarity With Counterfeiters
3/24: A Fair Price for Water
3/23: Unattractive Progress on Transportation
3/20: The Thrill of Demography
3/19: About This Global Economy Business...
3/18: Toilet Heresy
3/17: St Patrick and Your Asteroid Insurance
3/16: Rebellion in Tennessee
3/13: Good News from the Senate
3/12: Children and Cancer
3/11: Save Our Beaches!
3/10: Die Gruenen und der SDP
3/9: In Search for the Holy Grail of the Forests
3/6: My Doom, Your Gloom
3/5: The Great D. P. Moynihan
3/4: "An Earthquake in Insurance"
3/3: Salmon Farming
3/2: Our Friends the Duck Killers
2/27: Trust El Nino
2/26: That Darn Triple-A
2/25: Cutting a Deal on Endangered Species
2/24: Fire? Again?
2/23: Garbage
2/20: Population Rebellion in the Sierra Club
2/19: The Trouble With Cattle
To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.