Formative Moments.

• Author: Ayres, Ed

What makes people care deeply (or not care deeply, as is too often the case) about the long term health of the planet? What could bring the kind of sea change in human behavior and belief that many experts now say must happen very quickly? Working on this Earth Day issue, I realized that the kinds of sweeping policy reforms or technological revolutions that change the course of civilization aren't necessarily the influences that move us most immediately as individuals. We have listed some of those civilization-changing events on pages 12 and 13, but as I consider them, I realize they are the events that merely set the stage upon which we act as individuals. But what actually motivates us to act as we do?

As a WORLD WATCH reader, you are presumably among those who do care deeply, and it would be of interest to know what gave you the consciousness or commitment you now have. Were there particular experiences you had as a kid, or as a student, or in your work or your reading, for example, that--whether subtly or dramatically--changed the course of your life? It would be good to know what makes us all tick, because it's a question of considerable importance to the future volition of society at large. I reflected on what had made me care, and realized that many of my own formative moments go back to childhood--and that at the time, most of them probably didn't seem all that momentous. Others came later, and had a more galvanizing effect. Among them:

* Playing in the woods of northern New Jersey as a young kid in the 1940s and coming upon a jack-in-the-pulpit, which I had been taught to recognize and had been told is "very, very special and should never be picked." I don't think I ever felt a need to ask why. It may have been one of the first times I felt a sense of the sacred.

* Reading Robin Hood around the age of 11 or 12 and being entranced by the notion of living with a bunch of guys in a forest under "a great oak tree with branches spreading broadly around," and venturing forth now and then to relieve the rich and pompous Sheriff of Nottingham of his gold so we could give it to the poor. (Decades later, a Robin Hood-like fellow would appear on the cover of WORLD WATCH, boldly challenging a heavily armored knight whose face could not be seen--to illustrate an article about the emerging environmental challenge to the GATT. A few years after that, when the GATT was absorbed into the World Trade Organization, it was no longer a faceless...