This book emerged from a series of op-eds in the Boston Globe in the fall of 2016. I want to thank the Globe’s wonderful and celebrated op-ed page editor Marjorie Pritchard for her ideas, enthusiasm, and inimitable editorial support and guidance in preparing these pieces. The Boston Globe is a glorious paper that I still consider to be my “hometown” paper following my thirty years living in the Boston area from 1972 to 2002.
My enormous gratitude also goes to my academic hometown press, the Columbia University Press. There is a great joy for a university professor to work with one’s own university press, but the joy is greatly magnified when the press is a justly world-renowned scholarly publisher. I am thrilled that Columbia University Press published my previous book (The Age of Sustainable Development, 2015) and also enthusiastically supported this project. My special thanks go to Bridget Flannery-McCoy for her energy and help at every stage and for expediting the publication schedule so that this book came out in time for the incoming Trump administration and Congress in January 2017. Also, I am grateful to Patrick Fitzgerald, editor for the life sciences and sustainability, for his continuing confidence and support.
My special assistant, Ms. Mariam Gulaid, helped me at every stage to produce this book, as always with her great accuracy and unbounded good cheer.
And of course my thanks are endlessly due to my wife, Sonia, my partner in everything, and my wonderfully wise and inspiring children, Lisa, Adam, and Hannah, who work very hard trying to keep their father on track.