Passing the torch.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: NOTE FROM A WORLDWATCHER - Editorial

When I was 50, I ran a 146-mile footrace across Death Valley, from the lowest point in the contiguous United States (Badwater, 280 feet below sea level) to the highest (the peak of Mt. Whitney, 14,491 feet). The temperature for the 100 miles across Death Valley hovered around 125 degrees, and by the time I reached the official finish line at the upper terminus of the Mt. Whitney auto road, at around 8,000 feet, I was beyond exhaustion. But the runner's code in this race is that you don't stop at the official finish line, which is where it is because the National Forest Service won't allow competitions on the trail to the peak. So, finish line or not, you keep on running until you reach the peak. My last two miles up the windswept rocks were positively exhilarating.

Now, in my 60s, I'm still running those "ultramarathon" races, still enduring the long hours of dehydration, depletion, and meditation--and still feeling the thrill of finishing strong.

And so it will be with my work at World Watch. I'm not about to quit, but I'm quite ready to finish. This issue is my last.

A few months ago, my wife and I went to visit my younger brother and his wife in Southern California. We first flew into the San Francisco Bay area to visit friends, then rented a car and drove down the coast to Los Angeles. On the few occasions when I've ever had to rent a car, I've always asked for the smallest one they have. This time, I was given a Chevrolet. It was the first General Motors car I'd driven since writing my book What's Good for GM, 35 years ago, and I felt uncomfortable even getting into it. The role of cars in climate change wasn't on the horizon in 1969, but the signs that cars were dominating our lives in worrisome ways were all around us. In my book, I had written about the emerging problems of car-dominated cities, a car- and oil-dominated economy, and car-inflicted isolation. It was a time when highway builders were bulldozing their way through cities with impunity. Neighborhoods were being cut off from each other, and car drivers cut off from their environment. In the decades since, that kind of isolation has spread from cars to the whole built environment--both physical and electronic. Increasingly, we spend our lives in vehicles and buildings with artificial light, climate control, and sound-proofing. Even cognitively, more and more of our experience is the artifice of TV or movie fiction, video game conflict, or the contrived dreams and deceptions...