By: Susan Young

Retirement is more about new beginnings than endings.  Leaving the old life behind, starting out fresh, looking for new adventures.  It is also a time for introspection and renewal.  For the last thirty or forty years I have been driven by needs, first my own and then my family’s.  There was little time for thought about the impact my choices had on the world around me.  Now there is time and the needs are not so impelling.  Now I have no excuses left as to why I can or can not do something different.  I can, the question is “Will I?”
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Being green is becoming fashionable but not fast enough to suit the serious environmentalists.  As the alarms go out about global warming and species extinction I rememberl sitting in the first “environmental” studies class offered at Cal Poly in 1966.  I don’t recall the  instructor’s name but I do remember the alarming predictions he presented to the class.  If his predictions had been accurate the our world would have self-destructed ten or twenty years ago.  He taught that we were headed for the end on all fronts: fossil fuel depletion, air and water pollution, and the biggie…overpopulation.  As far as I can tell we are still on that road to destruction but we seem to have slowed the pace.  Industry has been reined in and is polluting less.  Vehicles and fuels have been designed to produce less toxic byproducts and use less fuel.  Some countries have even taken the population problem to heart and set limits to child bearing.  I heard a few days ago that Japan is actually encouraging women to stay home and have babies now because their population growth has declined so much.
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Seems like we come a full circle on one hand but on the other it seems like we have move far at all.