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Joel Swerdlow went round the world in search of something that doesn’t exist. The millennium, after all, is an abstraction. Yet this veteran magazine writer found that the changing of the temporal odometer means a lot to a lot of people. From his fieldwork he crafted “Making Sense of the Millennium” for the January 1998 issue of NGM. He also found, as all writers do, that some of his research led him down pathways beyond the bounds of his manuscript. So he’s sharing those thoughts exclusively with our online audience.
My involvement with NGM’s millennium coverage began reluctantly. The millennium is artificial, I thought, a media-hype, a non-event abused by Madison Avenue hucksters. The world won’t change because a bunch of zeroes appear. But as I helped Bill Douthitt, the Society’s millennium guru, identify the six themes that form the basis for the magazine’s millennium coverage, my research made me realize that the year 2000 offers an invaluable opportunity to sit back and take stock, and I found myself volunteering to write “Making Sense of the Millennium” for January’s magazine. The human race is at a crossroads. Key issues such as growth in human population, now approaching six billion, and threats to biodiversity confront us. People alive today, and perhaps one or two more generations following us, will make decisions—such as whether to restrict the destruction of natural habitats, to limit the size of their families, to keep relying on fossil fuels—that will irreversibly affect the future of life on Earth. As I sifted through volumes of research material on such weighty topics, three ideas crystallized that challenge accepted wisdom and prove that work on the millennium can be stimulating on a wide range of fronts. |
