"On the twenty-fifth day of the new Congress, when the House passed the balanced budged amendment to the Constitution, a small story in the paper noted an announcement from the world's climate researches that global temperature has resumed the steady upward climb briefly halted by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Within a few short years, the world will have much larger problems to face than budget deficits.
"And when that renewed concern inevitably emerges, we will need ideas on the table more far-reaching than recycling. From the environmental crisis must emerge a new politics, one that goes beyond the pipe dreams of Left and Right and especially Center. This book, the story of a journey, is filled with such ideas, each of them difficult but each of them drawn from real life. These examples fill me with hope. Not hope that environmental damage can be averted; it's too late for that. But hope that such damage can be limited and contained during the next few crucial decades, and hope that we can in some measure recover. In travels to urban South America, village India, and the deep forests of the Eastern United States, I found proof that here are other, less damaging ways to lead satisfying human lives, evidence that our infatuation with accumulation and expansion is not the only possibility. No trips I've ever taken have thrilled me as much. No previous journeys made the world seem so pliable, the character of human beings so open, the future so uninevitable.
"But I hesitate to admit my hope, for the word has been debased — as 'hope' is used in the context of the environment, people always seem to hope that the scientists are wrong, hope that their warnings are just 'doom and gloom,' hope that we'll 'muddle through.' Such is the message of the currently fashionable crop of 'environmental optimists.' But that's not hope — that's wishing. Real hope implies real willingness to change, perhaps in some of the directions suggested by this volume. Those suggestions, I repeat, seem out of step with the politics and the economics of the moment. But that does not mean change is impossible; all it means is that our politics is — temporarily — out of step with the chemistry and physics of the earth."
