Not long ago, I picked up a fine story collection by J. California Cooper, partly because of its title, The Future Has a Past. It set me to thinking about the way an understanding of history affects our perception of the present, and of something I heard the sociologist and peace activist Elise Boulding say years ago: that the image young people have of the future affects what transpires three decades later.

It’s now more than three decades since the first images of Earth from space brought the awareness that we live on a small and fragile planet. “We are all island people,” said ecologist Raymond Dasmann in 1971, during a talk on a Pacific island, New Caledonia. “Most of us did not fully realize this until we sent our astronauts into the skies and were shown a picture of island earth against its background of a black and star-specked sea of space....There is no continent to which we can flee, only other island planets where the environments are hostile and forbidding. We must do the best we can with what we have—other resources are not available. If we destroy those elements that we need for survival, we cease to exist.”

Inspired by that realization, crowds of young people moved out of cities in a quest for life in harmony with nature. Throughout the country, citizens joined in campaigns to safeguard our commons: the air, rivers, wetlands, forests, parklands, wildlife habitat, and our coasts and nearshore waters. It was an expansive, promising decade; positive change was on the move, and the direction of public policy changed. The myth that jobs and environmental protection were incompatible was unmasked as a sham. Developers were required to consider the environmental costs of their projects.

So it can be said that the vision at the dawn of the space age was translated into action, however imperfectly, and has affected the course of affairs. Over and over again, voters have shown that they value environmental protection. Elise Boulding’s theory has been borne out.

How, then, to explain the current federal government’s attack on our shared values? Our right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, enjoy ourselves as part of nature within a diversity of species is increasingly threatened. The powers that be in Washington appear to be bent on undoing three decades worth of environmental protections against destructive human behavior.

At a February 1 gathering in the Monterey Bay Aquarium to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Proposition 20, the 1972 Coastal Initiative, leaders of that successful grassroots campaign warned that everything that has been won is now again threatened, and urged activists to prepare to fight again for the coast. Richard Charter, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, saw a “most insidious and multi-layered attack,” and Coastal Commissioner Sara Wan saw a threat of “death by a thousand cuts,” and warned that “government doesn’t work without public involvement.”

Because the future has a past, it’s helpful to look at how the coast was won in 1972, with little more than “shoe leather and cauliflower ears from the telephone,” as Lew Reid tells us in the interview on page 27. Thousands of citizens were involved—all volunteers. They worked hard and played hard. You can’t fight for life if you’re grim and fearful. They used their imaginations and had fun. Warner Chabot of the Ocean Conservancy recalls that when opponents plastered Los Angeles with a thousand billboards reading “Don’t lock up the coast, vote No on Proposition 20,” some high school students, equipped with stickers reading “Yes,” went cruising one night. By the following morning, half of the opponents’ signs were urging people to vote Yes in Day-Glo red. And they did. The landmark “Save Our Coast” initiative passed and was embodied four years later in the California Coastal Act. Reid points out that Proposition 20 carried a lesson: “When the legislature is not courageous enough to face a critical issue...the people are likely to do so.”

I tracked down Elise Boulding, now 82 and living in Needham, Massachusetts, to ask her: What future might the people currently in power in Washington possibly have imagined 30 years ago? What might have made them so angry and fearful? “An image of infinite power, superpower, a very sad image,” she suggested, “not the image that would fulfill the dream on which the United Nations was founded.”

Boulding’s latest book, published in 2000 by Syracuse University Press, is Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History. For many years she held workshops that brought people together to think a hundred years ahead and envision a world at peace, then work backward to the present to find the way to get there. Though her health does not permit her to travel much now, she continues to participate in efforts to transform war cultures into “an interconnected localist world of adventurous but peaceful problem-solvers.”