Columbia University historian, and Brit, Simon Schama has offered a provocative early history of the 00s for The Guardian.
He writes in part: “But if, for the hell of it, we can imagine an oracular, though fully digitised, historian a century hence – let’s call her Sibyl – looking back at the first five years of the millennium, and marvelling at the the obtuseness of the generation that failed to see The Writing On The Wall, what would it be about the noughties that she would single out as glaringly ominous?
“Well, Sibyl would say, there was the teeny matter of the beginning of the end; of planet Earth, that is, the last chance of reversing the irreversible damage that has been done to the ecosystem, beside which all the rest of its problems were small potatoes. Short of taking the current president of the United States by the scruff of the neck and dunking his head deep into the rapidly melting Arctic ice cap, what more did the Earth need to do to make someone listen to its cry for help? But this was the decayed decade, when everything that urgently needed to be done to reverse carbon emissions was identified, documented, articulated – and then systematically obstructed by the power that was disproportionately responsible for the damage. When the rest of the world shouted “Emergency”, America chanted back “Growth”. So it got the growth of a malignant tumour.” Read the whole thing.
