Conscious uncoupling

After attending the Breakthrough Dialogue for seven years straight, I made the difficult decision that it would be my last dialogue event, at least for a while. Invaluable as it has been to meet others outside the hegemonic fold of traditional environmentalism, I thought that I owed my kids to finally be home for Midsummer. I also felt that it would be fun to spend more of my travel budget going to new places rather than returning over and over to the Bay Area (as much as it will always have a special place in my heart).

Little did I know that my highly premeditated decision would not matter much as SARS-CoV-2 came along and cancelled the Dialogue for everyone. Tentatively rescheduled to October and relocated to Northern Virginia, it is most unclear what the post-corona world will look like. While it is always tempting to overstate the importance of the present, I fear that this pandemic will turn out to be quite determinative, at least for the first half of the 2020’s.

So, with no transatlantic travel in store, I instead bought a new coffee-table book about a man who ran 3,700 miles across the continental United States, simply perfect for some Friday fantasizing.