Ten years ago, I was one of a group of activists fighting the world’s largest hazardous waste incinerator. We were in the middle of an eye-gouging street brawl with the new Clinton administration, which had broken its promise to shut the burn box down. The incinerator was in a poor neighborhood, next to a school, the emissions from it were potently toxic and with an irony that was lost on no one, many of the activists fighting it were chain-smoking night and day.

We were under a huge burden of stress and – let’s be honest – nicotine is a wonderful drug. Cigarettes, paper tubes filled with tobacco and set afire, are the perfect nicotine-delivery system. Shake a cigarette from its pack, put one end in your mouth, light the other end and inhale. The motions can be executed faster than you can read the words to describe them and just that fast the nicotine is in your bloodstream.
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A woman with whom I went to high school is an astronaut in the space shuttle program. When the Columbia broke apart over Texas a few weeks ago, I – and I suppose a number of people in our graduating class – passed moments of heightened anxiety until we learned she was not on board. Not this time.

There was grief among the families, friends and old classmates of the seven astronauts who did die, grief that stays fresh with each successive news report about what went wrong, stories about tight budgets, cut corners and deferred maintenance.
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I’m writing this on Wednesday morning; I’ve got a deadline to meet. In the next office, a public-interest health care advocate is preparing legislative testimony on medical malpractice insurance. Her documents show jury awards for medical malpractice are not outrageous, as some doctors and the insurance industry would have us believe. The rising cost of malpractice insurance – and other kinds of insurance – is driven by the billions of dollars the insurance industry lost in the stock market in the past few years.

On this side of the wall, in my office, an e-mail fills the computer screen. It tells me an old friend and colleague died just after midnight. For the second time since Christmas, I have lost a friend to a disease that should have been treated very easily.
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The Bronze Age lasted 2,500 years; the Iron Age 1,100. As technology becomes more sophisticated one age is quickly overtaken by the next. What should we call the period dominated by petroleum products? “Age” seems too expansive a term for what will be an eyeblink of history; perhaps we should call it the “Oil Moment.”

The Oil Moment, future history books will record, lasted from about 1880, when the first commercial oil wells began hitting their stride, until 2040, when the last battles were fought for a diminishing supply.
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