It's been a year since the Foreign Policy Association and I started this blog. There have been 140 posts before today covering a range of topics from developments in legislation, to international relations, to renewable energy, to all sorts of business initiatives, and much more. It's been an education for me and, I hope, for you, dear reader.
Looking back at my first post, Welcome to the FPA on Climate Change, I'm glad to say that I've stayed on course fairly well. I wrote then "The parlous state of our planet's health is being addressed, albeit in fits and starts, but the recognition of the terrible problem we've created is deepening and solutions are being actively sought." I said there was " going to be a lot of news from Washington." There sure was. I said: "Hopefully, we are in what Thomas Kuhn would call a "paradigm shift' and there are going to be more and more positive developments in renewable energy and energy conservation, land use, and transportation." There have been many positive developments indeed and the pace of them seems to be accelerating. I summed up my views of 2007 in December with this post, Year in Review.
I've noted the feeling that has come over me more than once during the year in which I feel as if I've woken up from a long sleep, as Rip Van Winkle did, to find a world that I previously might not have dreamt possible. The extraordinary viability and continuing growth of these positive developments is something I hoped would come true when I strolled along Fourteenth St. in Manhattan on the very first Earth Day almost 40 years ago. My youthful hopes were severely battered along the way and, to tell you the honest truth, I despaired of our ever being able to aspire to half of what we've got cooking now.
Yet, here we are, truly truckin', and we can look to Mr. Natural, courtesy of Bob Crumb, to know that we simply need to "Keep on Truckin'."
