What are you doing this Saturday?

Perhaps you’re taking a stand to help slow climate change by participating in one of more than 4,000 actions in 170 countries being organized by 350.org. The number, as the organization will tell you, represents the parts per million of carbon dioxide thought to be the upper limit for avoiding runaway climate change (we are currently at 387 parts per million).

You can come to your own conclusions about whether or not to join these actions. As a journalist, perhaps I shouldn’t attempt to sway you to action. However, it is also my responsibility to describe the world in which we live, to clearly present information and to sort through the distractions – both unintended and intended – that obscure the truth.

As my career has evolved, I have found myself increasingly drawn to exploring how society copes with the possibility of a changing environment from a political, scientific, sociological and cultural perspective. Many facets of contemporary life have an environmental component, including politics, the economy, culture and technology.

Much is made about the emergence of green technologies and there are great business stories to pursue revolving around sustainability, but there is so much more. Voters are making green issues a higher priority, cities are incorporating environmental standards and requirements in planning decisions, romantic partners are choosing to hold carbon-neutral weddings and environmental litigation and prosecutions are keeping many lawyers, and law enforcement personnel, busy.

There are many questions to be answered about the intersections of the environment and society. How do we as a society cope with the possibility of a changing climate and shifting availability of resources? How do environmental transitions affect society, politics, family and personal relationships? How do they affect our mythology and our beliefs? Humans tend to progress in crisis, or to change, to be at their best, and I would like to observe and document society’s reaction to environmental shifts. How does a slow-moving crisis affect human behavior?

In recent years I’ve had discussions with my grandmother about her cousin, the journalist Melville Jacoby. Melville served as a correspondent in China and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early 40s, eventually penning articles for outlets such as Time, Life and the United Press Syndicate at the onset of World War II. Melville was my age at the time — younger actually — yet he was so deeply immersed he reported from the midst of a narrow escape from the Philippines after the Japanese invasion and, earlier during his travels through China, became close to Chiang Kai-Shek. Killed at 25 in an accident in Australia in 1942, he left behind rich accounts of his life in the form of letters, dispatches and photos now in my grandmother’s possession.

In exploring these accounts, I realize Melville played a central role telling stories about one small part of another great, global crisis. Perhaps the war was more romantic than the environmental movement’s seemingly glacial pace, but both crises are the defining milieus of a particular generation. Like Melville, I want to chronicle my generation’s response to its crisis.

Continue reading “A life, a career, a world repurposed”