Journal #2: Sustainability

 (Continuation of the Journal begun in the previous entry. The text dates from the early 1990s.)

World March of Women 2015 - Quebec

    When I was born World War II raged. At the end there was a promise of a new age of prosperity and peace through technology and science. And through the fifties and then the sixties, it seemd to deliver. Lester Pearson (then Prime Minister of Canada) offered "Atoms for Peace." Among the very first books I ever read in the local library was a simple explanation of atomic theory. I learned how reactors worked. I became fascinated with science. The green revolution promised prosperity for poor countries. The United nations, which I visited when I was 15, promised an end to war between Nations. Kennedy came along, with Martin Lucher King, and we dreamed of racial equality (in the U.S.A.). And then ... it began to unravel. And we began to recognize the limiations and not only the limitation but we began to take stock of the dimensions of resistance (from privileged interests, from the transnationals, from governments and the media, from the military, even from the rigid attitudes of the poor who had bought the dream - and from the Church. It was not going to be either easy or quick. The entire structure had to be dismantled and reconstructed. Maybe we'd never see more than some signs of utopia in our own lifetime.   ...
     The struggle for a sustainable way of living, a sustainable economy and politics involves a careful mapping out of a new way of understanding fundamental human ventures. It means a new way of looking at science and technology, of the secular and the rleigious. It is a question of revisioning, but it is also a quesstion of evoling a strategy of moving from where we are now. ...
     Chicken Little cried, "The heavens are falling, the heavens are falling." And indeed they are. The world will end. I have seen the world end several times in my life. ... But we learn to survive the crises and the deaths. Each provides a challenge and also an opportunity.