Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman, ends with him quoting a eulogy. The eulogy is for Donella H. “Dana” Meadows, a “Dartmouth-based environmental expert and writer” who died in 2001. The remarks at her memorial service were made by Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and they express the kind of cautious hope or somber optimism for which Meadows was known. The eulogy, especially the little story near the end, is remarkably uplifting:

A biologist, perhaps E.O. Wilson, noted that bees, ants, and termites, though not very smart individually, display high intelligence collectively- and then he added, “People seem just the opposite.” Dana was an exception. She was one of those promising specimens that are turning up more and more often in the search for intelligent life on earth- one of those much higher primates whose love, logic, radical stubbornness, courage, and passion awaken the rest of us to our ability and our responsibility to save the world…She wrote three years ago, “By nature I’m an optimist; to me all glasses are half-full,” yet she didn’t shrink from reporting bad news, always blended with encouragement about how to do better. She treated the future as a choice, not fate, and she defined with luminous clarity how to do (as one sometimes must) what is necessary. She shared Rene Dubos’s view that despair is a sin, so when asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she’d always say that we have exactly enough time- starting now. Two years ago, when e-mailing an unusually somber column about events that made her weep, she appended the following note as counterpoint: “A CEO was having to babysit for his young daughter. He was trying to read the paper but was totally frustrated by the constant interruptions. When he came across a full page of the NASA photo of the Earth from space, he got a brilliant idea. He ripped it up into small pieces and told his child to try to put it back together. He then settled in for what he expected to be a good half-hour of peace and quiet. But only a few minutes had gone by before the child appeared at his side with a big grin on her face. ‘You’ve finished already?’ he asked. ‘Yep.’ she replied. ‘So how did you do it?’ ‘Well, I saw there was a picture of a person on the other side, so when I put the person together, the Earth got put together, too…’ “

There will soon be 7 billion people that we can “put together” to work on the energy, economic, and environmental challenges that will face our earth, define our generation, and shape our future. It’s not too late to ween ourselves off oil, institute a cap-and-trade system, invest in clean technology, and take the measures (big and small) that will allow us to live sustainably and to thrive economically.

We have exactly enough time— starting now.

- Justin Manger