Lynda Schneekloth, Professor Emerita, School of Architecture and Planning/University at Buffalo

Abstract

Climate Change is causing great harm to the earth, all people, and life itself. Can EDRA help frame a meaningful and effective response that includes shaping a new vision of human/environment relations? This paper discusses EDRA’s unique contribution to this global conversation in the context of U.S. universities and professional life – as researchers, designers, teachers, public servants, organizers, citizens, and public intellectuals. The paper discusses some of the imaginal and powerful work going on in academia, in neighborhoods, in agencies and other civic organizations that seeks to understand and uncover the mythic structures of our culture / stories / practices at the foundation of the crisis and offer alternative visions of a shared future. The paper offers insights into emerging frameworks such as Movement Generation, the youth movement and Standing Rock that are based in new stories, new paradigms, and new intersectional relationships among disciplines, people, missions, and places that are producing transformative practices. Emerging blueprints can inform EDRA on the task of moving beyond apocalyptic pronouncement into a new and just human/environment relationship. EDRA has been and can continue to be an organization that challenges entrenched paradigms starting with its initial premise 50 years ago that the subject of our inquiries and practice is human/environment as an ecological unit. EDRA has the history, the intellectual breadth and inherent aspirations to fully engage the climate emergency. This paper challenges the organization to fully embrace this challenge. We can do more.

Introduction

It’s the 50^th anniversary of the Environmental Design Research Association! HAPPY BIRTHDAY EDRA! Fifty makes a big difference in one’s life, and in one’s organization and it is in celebration of this achievement that the conference organizers requested papers framing: EDRA at 50: Looking Forward, Looking Back.

This paper, EDRA: Another 50? raises the question of whether or not EDRA will actually exist 50 years from now. This question is asked not because of any flaws in the organization or the possibility that our work will become obsolete, but because of the overwhelming climate crisis we face. Human beings, are, and have been, unraveling the earth’s natural web of life and the world’s cultures by destabilizating the climate. Our impact has been so intense and so rapid that we have actually brought an end to a geological era!

Grace Lee Boggs asks: What time is it on the clock of the world? (Boggs, 1974, 18) According to the Doomsday Clock, we are two minutes to midnight, the closest we have ever been to apocalypse. The Doomsday Clock represents the likelihood of a human-caused global catastrophe, a metaphor for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technical advances. The dial was moved closer to midnight in 2017 because of three factors: climate change; the increasing threat of nuclear war, and threats to democracy, in part because of the gross inequalities produced by our current economic model. (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists n.d.)

We stand at a precipice of our own making. According to the most recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC’s 2018), we have about a decade to take action to decrease the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by 50% before facing catastrophic and irreversible consequences to life on our planet. Will we take action? It is uncertain, and right now, uncertainty is our best friend as it leaves open a space for hope and action.

Most of the members of EDRA are informed about the climate crisis so this paper will not focus on what’s happening. Rather, the discussion that follows addresses how EDRA might position itself in the climate story. If ever there were a human / environment issue that needs attention, it is climate justice. And as our practice, it is useful to understand the origin and context of the any issue being examined, in this case, the climate change.

My Ancestry DNA results came in.

Just as I suspected, my great great grandfather was a monarch butterfly.

Much of who I am is still wriggling under a stone.

I am part larva, but part hummingbird too.

There is dinosaur tar in my bone marrow . . . Fred LaMotte (2017)

Humans and the environment share an origin story with the entire universe. Every atom on earth and in your body came from that star that exploded more than 13 billion years ago, making us kin to all beings and all material on Earth. We are truly stardust. Nevertheless, in recent times, we have created and now live in a story of separation and discontinuity, a very new story in the 200,000 year old history of humans. The imagination of separation at center of this new story has had grave consequences not only for us, but for all being with whom we share this planet. This story is the cultural context of the origin of EDRA because without this story of discontinuity, we wouldn’t have ‘human’ and ‘environment’ separated.

The founding of EDRA at the end of the 1960s was, like its times, a bit radical. Most of the founders, both designers and researchers, were at the edges of their respective disciplines. They were searching for a foundation to their collective work that included knowledge generation and reflective practice in service of a quality of life for people and their worlds. This group sought a double focus: design and research, people and environments.

This beginning conversation generated an association that was somewhat unique in that the founders came together because of a shared vision of what they believed the world could be, not because they shared a disciplinary background. The topics engaged and methods developed over the years attest to their vision: play environments, institutional settings, the elderly, dementia, urban streets, post occupancy evaluation and programming, the disabled and access to the environment, typology, housing, etc.

Not being organized solely around one established discipline created some interesting opportunities. The conferences and conversations occurred under a ‘big tent’ – everyone was welcome. Because of different disciplinary backgrounds, members were challenged to ponder questions in that would not have asked in our own spaces. The diversity of membership brought in knowledge from different fields and diverse methods of research.

At the same time, being multi-disciplinary presented some challenges such as legitimization. There were organized efforts to established academic programs, to identify a specific area of knowledge, to provide a path for tenure, venues for publications, and more inclusive and relevant design education. The professionals wanted to be recognized as having special knowledge and methods of working so that there were employment opportunities in the field-becoming.

The tension of being open and being legitimate has been engaged at the board level and during the annual meetings for years. How best to govern the rather unruly crowd that call EDRA their scholarly and professional home? Interestingly, EDRA has functioned somewhat like a ‘swarm organization’, reflected in a structure that spends more time getting people in than in keeping them out (Swarmwise 2013).

But perhaps the most radical aspect of EDRA’s origin was the focus on relationship - the space between humans and environments. At the height of modernism in the mid-20^th century, here was a group that identified their work as a concern about connection, about the interactions and interdependency of people/place/behaviors. Theories and approaches such as behavior setting theory, spatial analysis, phenomenology, wayfinding, placemaking, semiotics, environmental psychology and so on represented an efforts to advance the more relational, ecological imagination accepted today. EDRA members jumped into ‘wicked problem” early and insisted that we understand the world in its complexity, as difficult as that may be (Horst and Rittle 1973).

A review of EDRA proceedings, the Advances book series and other EDRA media demonstrates an ongoing exploration of the nature of knowledge and epistemology. There has been an ongoing examination of the discussion about the whether or not knowledge generated in one place is then applied in another, or if different forms of knowledge were generated in different setting. How do different ways of knowing integrate into new knowledge about people and place? This was a particularly thorny set of questions for an organization that embraced both research and practice. Specifically, the ongoing conversation of participatory design, user involvement, action research and the incorporation of local knowledge challenged the model of expert knowledge. Over time, the concept of the positionality of knowledge allowed for expert knowing, but also accepted the limits of that knowledge. Knowing where knowledge is situated is critical, but that position does not argue that all knowledge formation therefore is equal.

Over the last 50 years, EDRA has evolved and deepened its knowledge base and its methods to offer more accurate accounts of the relationships and interactivity among people, place and culture. The multi-disciplinary nature of the work is now an accepted practice and the importance of positionality in both research and professional practice recognizes multiple forms of knowing. At this same time, the organization has achieved legitimization that supports its members, its policy work, and the lives of so many people.

THE CLIMATE CRISIS AND EDRA

It is the founding vision and particular set of character traits that facilitates EDRA’s suitability to take on climate change and climate justice. Yet at this critical moment in history, we may need again to push against of standard academic and professional practices of the day to formulate our work in terms of human species / planetary environment. What part of the earth are humans? We know that human civilization emerged during a stable climatic era in the earth’s history. The Holocene, beginning about 12-10,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, gave rise to agriculture, cities and intense creative technologies in both the physical and social realm. Our power to impact the earth has led to the illusion that we are in charge and that by some right, the limitless resources of the earth are at our disposal.

Interestingly, it was also 50 years ago, December 24, 1968, that the true realization of the finiteness and fragility of the planet was made visible with the photograph of the earth from space. On that day, the population of humans was 3.7 billion; today we are more than 7 billion, representing 0.01% of all life on earth. (Bar-on, 2018). To put that in context, biomass (including us) accounts for one part in ten billion of earth’s mass, and as far as we know, virtually nothing in the universe. (Eisenberg, p 373). Humans are such a small part of the earth yet we are taking up a lot of space, using an enormous amount of resources, and polluting land, water and air with our waste way beyond our ‘positionality.’

To date, most of the solutions about the rapid global warming have focused on the current and predicted impacts on humans; much less solution oriented attention has been directed to human impacts on the earth’s ecology. Climate activist are pushing for renewable energy and electric cars, more intensive agriculture, sea routes through the Arctic -- all humans needs and desires. This emphasis continues the story that we are separate from, and more important than, the rest of the web of life. What we need to imagine is that global warming is a symptom of the severe destruction of the basic functioning and the biodiversity of earth, the earth that includes us.

We are in the midst of the sixth great extinction (Kolbert 2014).

• Insects, that outweigh humanity by 17 times, are in rapid decline because of intensive agriculture, pesticides, urbanization and climate change. Our food, and the food of millions of other creatures are dependent on them (Carrington, 2019)

• 70% of all birds on the planet are farmed poultry and only 30% are wild (Bar-on 2018)

• Of existing mammals, 60% are livestock, mostly cows and pigs, humans are 36% and wild animals account for only 4% of total mammal populations. In our interactions with the world, we have recently destroyed 83% of wild animals (Bar-on, 2018)

Global climate change has made visible the perhaps unintended consequence of the collective human actions that started with agriculture. But it is in the last 150 years and the use of fossil fuels that have taken us to the edge of the cliff or perhaps a better characterization is to say to the top of the atmosphere, the very thin six mile shield of gases that protects the earth community from the harmful rays of our sun - a distance a human can walk in two hours.

Too bad we didn’t start 50 years ago at the initial alarms to drawn down carbon emissions and rapidly undo the symptoms of climate instability. Scientists and climate activist are implicated in the slow response because of their own sub-cultures. Scientists are cautious and not inclined to speak until they have some level of certainty. Environmentalist, who early understood the situation, allowed global warming to be siloed as an environmental issue rather than a global cultural crisis. Moreover, the communication strategy of using detailed science and pending threats only served to generate fear or rejection. If we had been more reflective, we would have realized that we were alarmed because of our love of our children, our place, and of the earth, not because we were afraid. Now, so many years later, we know love of place and people is the conversation we must have (Eisenstein, 2018).

At this late hour, we now need radical actions at all scales from global to national to local and across all ecosystems. It will not be possible to take effective climate action without also creating a new story about who we are as a species, as a human culture, and transforming not only our economic models but our very relationship with the earth. It is not certain that this is possible.

Because this crisis is rooted in a human/environment relationships, EDRA and its members and their home in universities are especially suited to look at the situation we find ourselves in and to engage the best thinking, research, theory building and practices we can imagine. Addressing this seems like a good challenge given that our very livelihood as university based academics and professionals is dependent on a functioning level of civilization; all the predictions are telling us that even this, our empire, is endangered.

To date, universities have played a critical role through their engagement in the science of climate change. Research models of predicted impacts have been so accurate. The uncertainly of what will happen rests, however, in the human domain. Here, we truly, we don’t know what is going to happen or when. What we do know is that there are severe consequences to continue experimenting with the future of life on earth. If we can continue to experiment to failure, the consequences will be devastating, and they would not be ‘unintended.’

We will stand before whoever is able and willing to judge, or perhaps the silence of extinction, as a generation that willfully and unnecessarily imposed egregious wrongs on all future generations, depriving them of liberty, property, and life (Orr, 2009, p. 73).

SO WHAT NOW?

So what’s to do? The IPCC (2018) announced in its last report that we have until about 2030 to reduce our carbon levels at least 50% - worldwide. This is daunting and it is truly uncertain that it is even feasible. But for a moment, we can be thankful for the space of uncertainty because we are not powerless; we can take action. Like the young people.

Look at Varshini Prakash, one of the founders of the Sunrise Movement, or Alexandria Villasenior, the 13 year old climate activist who is cofounder and co-director of US Youth Climate Strike. All over the world, young people are striking and leaving their schools to demand climate action. Celebrate the 21 youth plaintiffs associated with Our Children’s Trust who are suing the federal government in Juliana vs. Gov, arguing that they are being deprived of their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property because the government is not addressing climate change. These children are the prophets of today who refuse to be intimidated and demands adults take action.

Pay attention to Greta Thunberg who at 14 began striking school every Friday all by herself in Sweden who “speaks on behalf of future generations.”

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do. We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because want our hopes and dreams back (Thunberg 2019).

These past few months the swarm-organization, Extinction Rebellion, has made a huge impact in the UK, forcing attention onto Climate Change through their non-violent. These actions have been so successful that the British Parliament voted to declare that the planet was in a ‘climate emergency” on May 1, 2019 (Yahoo News, 2019). These young people openly express their sense of grief and compassion at the ecological disaster, holding public funerals for the species we have lost.

They have three demands:

1 #TellTheTruth - Declare a climate and ecological emergency.

2 #ActNow - Halt biodiversity loss and go net #ZeroCarbon2025.

3 #BeyondPolitics - A #CitizensAssembly for climate and ecological justice.

Maybe one of the most important things the adults can do is to stand with the kids as reparation for our inaction. Members of one local group in Buffalo, the Interfaith Climate Justice Community, are signing an Elder’s Pledge to support the youth.

It is inspiring that young people are awake and moving. But, young people need grownups. In fact, at a youth summit I recently attended, one of the youths said, “Where are the grownups?” “The power held by older generations both financially and politically, means that they also have the most significant ability to respond to the challenges of our time and hence they hold the most responsibility” (Call to our Elders, 2019). This generation of adults needs to speak the truth and take action, we need to move into the space of uncertainly and hope that we can still make a difference. But grownups need guidance, too, at ‘two minutes to midnight.’ What follows are stories and examples that could provide insights on climate justice action.

Deep Adaptation: An Academic Challenge: Jem Bendell, Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University Cumbria in the UK, has published “Deep Adaption: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” (Bendell 2018). He addresses how we might move into this climate crisis as university professors, educated professionals, and public intellectuals. He asks us to accept, for the moment, that there will be a deep disruption to the basic functioning of our civilization, a likely collapse within 10 years because we are already so deep into a non-linear global climate warming that. In this situation, what might we want to know? What might we want to do? How do we want to be? As thought leaders, we are responsible for considering alternative futures to adapt to the coming troubles. How will the upcoming traumas impact norms, behavior, psychology, cities, marginal communities, and the environment? What forms of social and economic structure could be resilient enough to push back against the disorder and displacement that is already increasing?

We, of course, don’t know the answers to these question. Not knowing is not an excuse to do nothing. Further, we do know some things and can proceed on those fronts. We know we must establish a process to keep fossil fuels in the ground which providing energy to maintain society at some level.

Bendell offers some thoughts and proposes that we consider alternatives akin to scenario planning, an open and creative way to ask “what if” questions when you don’t want something to seem ‘true,’ even if you don’t want to think about them. The three scenarios are collapse, catastrophe and extinction.

Collapse is already occurring in discrete places across the globe and will expand although it won’t be the same everywhere. Can we name the ways in which these disruptions impact normal functioning of society? Can we make plans to feed ourselves and large populations in the event of famine and how do we manage if there is a challenge to the rule of law? Recent experiences in Puerto Rico, the Maldives, Paradise, Ca., Syria, Yemen and the Sudan are instructive.

Catastrophe is a disruption of total systems and is a probable scenario if we continue as we are. Such a daunting disorder will forces us to absorb the huge migration of people whose homes are destroyed. How can we manage and contain epidemics or new disease vectors? What happens to all of our nuclear and toxic sites around this earth if no one is caring for them?

Massive extinction of the web of live, including us, is almost beyond comprehension, but it is possible without action. In this case, humans could lay the foundations for earth-healing before we are gone. Jamail writes that “ . . . even if that worst-case scenario is to run its course, there is time left for amends, honorable completions, and the chance to reconnect in to this Earth with the utmost respect, and in the gentlest of ways.” (Jamail 2019).

In a Deep Adaptation Agenda, Bendell proposes three types of actions that must be addressed:

1. Resilience: what we must preserve and how we will do it?

2. Relinquishment: what can we give up that gives us time and space?

3. Restoration - what do we need to repair, starting now?

EDRA members are already involved in research and/or practice about people and their places. Bendell’s challenge asks us to consider scenarios and the examination of resilience, relinquishment and restoration where we now stand in our work, in each situation, practice, research agenda. How will this place I know and these people I have come to love, be impacted by the effects of climate change in the near future; given this likelihood, what might we do? This practice doesn’t require changing a current academic/professional activity, but it does add a filter.

Movement Generation Justice And Ecology Project Group: Another model is displayed in the group Movement Generation (MG). These organizers seek to understand and communicate the deep cultural and oppressive roots of climate change to uncover the festering injustice that has led to this crisis. They work to resist the condition of exploitation and extraction that has done such damage to natural system and human beings They also offer a vision of how we might want to live and what we might want to do to get there.

MG curriculum maintains an ecological lens in the analysis of where we are, how we got here, and where we need to go reminding us that “Eco” means home – ecology, ecosystem, economics and yes, ecology matters. They demonstrate how social inequity is a form of ecological erosion brought through an imbalance in our actions toward the earth and other people.

In terms of climate change, they are clear that a transition is inevitable, but justice is not and therefore we must work to ensure that our movement works toward a Just Transition. An attitude of sacredness in our daily lives aids a reflective, responsive relationship to place, and helps identify the material and cultural shifts required. They use short messages: “[I]f it’s the right thing to do, we have every right to do it.” “What the hands do, the heart learns.” And they have developed valuable tools for assessing strategies for change, admonishing us all that if we’re not ready to govern this emerging world, we are not prepared to actually win over hearts and minds toward a more soulful vision of life.

MG has held retreats across the United States to aid communities to connect social/economic degradation and ecological destruction. Within the discourse of climate justice, MG has brought together the environmental community with the social/economic justice groups, building a much more robust movement working toward climate justice. When asked how they maintain their sense of presence and hope, they point to uncertainty. We still have time to shift our story and our actions. (Movement Generation)

Bill McKibben, Climate Prophet: In his new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, McKibben ventures that humans still have an outside chance to take sufficient actions to maintain a habitable Planet. Bill McKibben has been writing about climate change since his 1989 book, The End of Nature, and it is heartening that in his recent writings, he takes a more hopeful position than in the past. He calls for engagement, not despair.

McKibben explores two technologies or inventions that might push us through this crisis and change the rules of the game that got us into the mess in the first place: Solar Panels and Non-Violence. He argues that solar panels are technologies of repair, social repair as well as environment healing. They are a decentralized form of energy production, diffused through communities and offer the opportunity for shared ownership replacing centralized corporate control of energy. At this moment in 2019, we still have the resources nationally to shift to a renewables infrastructure. We also have the technology to produce and deploy these forms of energy using our existing production capacity, and a workforce that can do it. We’ve made these rapid shifts in the past as at the beginning of WWI – we could do it again.

The discussion on non-violence is intriguing in light of the use of the strategies in the children’s movements and Extinction Rebellion campaigns. He defines non-violence as the “full sweep of organizing aimed at building mass movements whose goal is to change the zeitgeist and hence, the course of history” (McKibben, 2019b, p. 219). Think of the Occupy Wall Street movement that gave us the language and concept of the 1%. Or the Standing Rock campaign again the Keystone pipeline that exhibited extraordinary restraint fueled by the love of place and commitment to protect the water and land. McKibben writes that non-violence is a powerful technology although we are only beginning to understand how to deploy it. We need to understand why Standing Rock so provocative, and why people are so inspired and moved to action by the Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, youth school strikes.

The Green New Deal, the Media and Climate Change: The 2018-19 Green New Deal resolution and legislation, sponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markley, is the first comprehensive blueprint to stop and reverse global warming by decarbonizing the U.S. economy and building a more robust and just society. The name is obviously a reference to the package of legislation that came to be known as the New Deal of the 1930’s, signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We have much to learn from that experience about what worked and what didn’t but probably most important lesson is this: in the midst of the Great Depression’s economic and environmental collapse, we, as a nation, took action to reform and repair ourselves.

People may vaguely remember the Crash of 1929, the intense wealth disparities that preceded it, and the Dust Bowl that force the migration of millions of people from their homes. What we might not know is that by 1930 ”five sixth of the original indigenous animal populations that existed in the United States when the Europeans arrived had been wiped out. Seven eighths of the original woodland had been cleared“ (Baker 2019, p. 27). The United States lost one-sixth of its invaluable soil in the Dust Bowl because farmers moved into the dry upper Midwest, encouraged by Big Railroad’s propaganda campaign to bring people to their new rail lines. A familiar story – ecological disaster, lying corporations, and intense economic inequities (Baker 2019).

The Green New Deal, like the original New Deal, has been met by strong opposition and ridicule from those invested in our current system such as wealthy individuals and corporations. But it has also been dismissed by centrist who say it is ‘impractical’ and ‘too expensive.’ What is impractical and too expensive is doing nothing in the face of the survival of the planet and our people. “Part of responsible leadership is alerting people to looming problems and rallying them to do something – and in this crisis, as so many, much less would have needed doing if we had done it sooner.” (Baker, 2019, p. 34).

To date, there has been little responsible leadership and the media and the press have failed to alert people to the climate crisis. To emphasize this point, Hertsgaard and Pope (2019), uncovered that the October 2018 IPCC report that warned that humanity had only 12 years to achieve carbon emissions goals or face an imminent collapse of ecological systems, was only covered in 22 of the 50 biggest newspaper in the United States! They point fingers at the press, suggesting that “[T]his journalist failure has given rise to a calamitous public ignorance which in turn has enabled politicians and corporations to avoid action.” (Hertsgaard and Pope, 2019, p. 14)

Members of the media are organizing a project, “#CoveringClimateNow” to provide support and guidelines for how they can alert the public with faithful, bold and fact-based reporting. They have proposed a series of principles for telling the climate story that they hope will resonate with their audiences. Here are a few:

Don’t blame the audience, listen to the kids

Establish a diverse climate desk but don’t silo climate coverage. It is about everything

Learn the science, share it

Cover the solutions

Don’t be afraid to point fingers, there really are bad guys.

The American people deserve to be informed of the impending impacts of climate destabilization. There can no climate action if people don’t even know what is happening and have a sense that they can do something about it. There has been enough of the misinformation and lies and doubt-spreading by those who profit from the continued use of fossil fuels, from those who profit from the harm done to communities, and from those who profit from the war machine.

The Environmental Design Research Association as a community has deep insights into the relationships and intersections among people, places and cultures. Within our fields of care that span academic and professional realms, it is time to ask what we need to know to facilitate a just transition through climate change. We know that people, communities and even nations, will grieve for their lost homes. Others may feel paralyzed by deep feelings of guilt at having unwittingly contributed to the destabilization of life on earth that has caused harm to people, cultures and places across the globe. How do we simultaneously attend to the human psyche, the soul of our kin, repair the damaged earth, and re-imagine our foundational cultural story of separation? We are, and always have been, a part of the earth family, and to be good citizens we will need to flourish within the limits of the planet.

“People, alone among creatures, can decide to put such limits on themselves.” (Mckibben 2019b, p. 228) Even God announced a self-limit after He destroyed all life on Earth through the great flood because of the wickedness of humans. And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth (Genesis 9:11 King James Version). Surely we, the creatures made in the image of God, can place limits on our actions, and protect and preserve Earth’s community, including us and our unique human contribution to life.

The Doomsday Clock registers two minutes to midnight. We find ourselves in a world threatened with collapse, catastrophe and even extinction, a world of our own making. Time is short. Humans as a species, our country, our communities such as EDRA, you and me, are at a crossroads. “The day is not far when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration” (Tielhard de Chardin, 1957, pp. 40-41).

We know what kind of world we want to live in and we do not choose the path of suicide. Nor do we choose to stand powerless in the face of inaction of governments or at the destructive actions of the few. Therefore, we can choose to address the climate crisis, working to ensure that justice is the root of our collective and personal actions. Remember “. . . that justice is what love looks like in public” (West, n.d.). You and I are called by the young of this world and by the silence of ongoing extinction, to speak truth about the climate crisis. We can be good ancestors to our children’s children hoping that they will be here on earth some future day to say thank you. The window of uncertainty will not be open long.

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