It must be an artefact of getting older, as I remarked to an old CND friend at the weekend, but I seem to be spending an increasing amount of time thinking about the past -- not the historical past but my personal past: the things I did, thought, said....presumably because, at my age, I now have many more years behind me than I am likely to have ahead of me, and it is therefore more personally fulfilling to recall my life to date than to address what might happen in the next twenty or thirty years.
Although, as a long-time New Scientist reader, I do feel rather jealous of those now in their twenties who will experience the beginnings of the end of what the magazine has called the Anthropocene: that period from 2030 to 2050, once average global temperatures have resumed their expected upward path after the temporary period of cooling imposed by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, when the world's agricultural and industrial systems begin to falter and implode. It will of course be a chaotic time for our species; but for anyone who manages to live through it, it should also be an extremely exciting one. I almost salivate with anticipation....although, knowing what I do about the life expectancies of males born in the early 1950s in the developed West, I'm statistically unlikely to see much of it.
On the other hand, I have already lived through some exciting times. The 1960s had pop and rock music and the 1970s had the collapse of the post-WW2 social consensus, but the 1980s had the struggle against nuclear weapons and for (as I put it a couple of days ago) "a Europe whole and free", even though that was more of an intellectual than an emotional campaign and one with a result that I scarcely expected to see in my lifetime. But "all that is solid melts into air" as Marx put it, and it was a genuinely thrilling and heady time, in the summer and autumn of 1989, to watch the old order crumbling by the day and a new world come, disoriented and disorientating, into being. I doubt that those who experienced it will ever forget it.
And for that reason I think I can just about accept not experiencing the beginnings of the end of the Anthropocene.
2 comments:
Joseph thank you for your recent blogs they have all added to my day. My small picture composite of feeding children and their friends,school commitments, afterschool circuits with kids, timetables for drop offs and pick ups, evening babble based on their view of their day, Pete off in the big world shaking and planning. It is good to turn on the duty computer to check what other people feel might be relevant and find huge dinasaurs emerging from cliffs once walked by a little girl in 1880 or so, bits of the Berlin wall or curious futures written and almost in view. Keep going with your relevence feed!!
*blush* Thanks for the supportive comments. *blush again*
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