What's Left? A Fresh Start ...

What's left? As a 63-year-old I occasionally ask this question with portentous, existential implication. Sometimes I answer hopefully: a few more decades, a few dozen growing seasons, a steady flow of good books to read, perhaps a few books to write. New friends? New causes? Grandchildren? There may be quite a lot that's left, just out of sight, around the bend.

But the title of this new blog is What's Left?--a harder question. Where is there a viable Left politics, of the sort I have long been drawn to, with respect to which I have tried to orient my life, or at least my politics? Do Left and Right mean anything any more, in this new world apparently dominated by billionaires and populist post-politicians? Is there hope for a leftward turn in the US or Europe or the other powerful capitalist democracies? Is there space for left activism here in Boston? Space anywhere for a new sort of Left, sometimes called eco-socialist, that would address the urgent environmental challenges, energy and climate most of all, within the framework of local, participatory, democratically managed economy?

What's left? In a world of more than 7 billion humans and decreasing numbers of other species, a world of unstable weather, shifting climate, declining food resources, ecological imbalance and degraded habitats, is there space for a humane culture, a vision of humans and human nature that responds to the centuries of humane vision that have preceded us? In a massively digitized world where 140 characters represent an upper bound of communication, is there much room left for culture, for reflection, for introspection?

I spent some of 2015 blogging about climate change (www.roadtoparis2015.blogspot.com), and it helped me to organize my thoughts about this huge and complex question. I don't intend to write on this blog as steadily, but I hope to record my thoughts from time to time about what's left--in all the senses I have suggested here, and then some. I hope others will visit and read what I write, and I hope they will add their own thoughts. Blogs are generally much more interesting when they are forums, not pulpits. Let's take turns.