A TV appeared in our family room in the early fifties pouring forth an endless stream of distractions—and an uplifting experience that lodged forever in my psyche. Although most shows were insipid or inane, even for a kid, gems like Sid Caesar and Crusader Rabbit kept me glued to the wooden console. One blessed evening, my vigil at the idiot box was rewarded with a mind-altering epiphany.

A striking sequence of images flashed on the snowy screen. The first was a crude depiction of planet Earth as seen from outer space. The second zoomed down to hover over North America. The third zeroed in on Southern California, where Los Angeles was marked by a big star pinpointing the very spot where I sat. A jaw-dropping revelation struck me: I could go the other way! Fortune made me an Angeleno, but it wasn’t a life sentence. The outbound journey beckoned.

I grew up in North Hollywood, the ideal hometown for nurturing a deracinated citizen of the world. Roots don’t go deep in a wasteland, as the tumbleweeds rolling by my house demonstrated (until developers paved over the rest of the San Fernando Valley). The vast jumble of the place was, to paraphrase a line from Saul Bellow, as if the country had been picked up by its northeast corner and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down slid to the southwest corner. The alienating hodgepodge that was LA, along with the cosmopolitan allure of San Francisco and New York City, the destinations of family holidays, fed a restless longing to expand the ambit of my experience.

As time passed, the lure of far-off places expanded to far-reaching ideas, not least in the realms of theoretical physics and the human condition. A hungry curiosity, and fear of missing out (FOMO avant la lettre), carried me off the beaten path geographically, philosophically, and politically. Had I come of age in a time of social stability, such deviation from the mainstream might have been the primrose path to isolation and eccentricity. But my life, arcing from World War Two to the turbulent contemporary world, has coincided with an era of tumultuous change. These serendipitous circumstances propelled me, a radical searcher, to the frontiers of engagement with critical issues of our historic moment.

We live on a different planet than the one I landed on in 1942. That was before the calamitous degradation of the biosphere by human activity. Before transnational capitalism deepened fissures among people, across generations, and between humanity and other species. Before the globalization of everything linked the destinies of people, nations, and planet. Before an unjust present and uncertain future enflamed a culture of anger and despair, and a politics of nativism and demagoguery.

Existential threats—mid-twentieth-century fascism and twenty-first-century systemic crisis—have bookended my life. The “greatest generation” rose to the challenge, defeating the genocidal madmen and giving humanity a new opportunity to nurture a flourishing, sustainable civilization. Instead, the merchants of greed and power won the peace, ushering in an age of turbo-capitalism, unabated nationalism, and environmental depredation. These malfeasant decades have left us with a nexus of interacting crises—a polycrisis—that bodes ill for a civilized future. Will a new great generation arise to turn the trajectory of history from madness to renewed possibility?

For now, deepening risks and elusive solutions swell the ranks of pessimism and catastrophism. Still, the rolling dialectic of history will bring countercurrents, surprises, and glimmers of hope. In our era—I call it the Planetary Phase of Civilization—the age-old cosmopolitan ideal of one world, rather than quixotic, resonates with the contemporary predicament. Material conditions have made the emergence of a flourishing world civilization in the coming decades an objective possibility—and an existential necessity. Envisioning this Great Transition—and nurturing a movement to bring it forth—has been the capstone of my work.

Pete Seeger (more on Pete later) liked to tell the story of two maggots clinging to a shovel. One falls off and lands in a deep crack in the sidewalk. The other lands in the carcass of a dead cat, which the lucky maggot eats for three straight days. Finally, he humps over to the crack in the sidewalk, looks down, and hollers, “How are you doing, brother?” His brother could barely speak: “I haven’t eaten in three days. But you, you’re so fat and sassy. To what do you attribute your success?” “Brains and personality! Brains and personality!”

I have been a lucky maggot, well-nourished in body, soul, and fellowship. Now I marshal my remaining brains and personality to recall some notable people, times, and ideas I’ve encountered in these decades of transformational change. The stories tap into facets of my life as an activist, futurist, scientist, institution-builder, and musician. I have had a ringside seat in this fraught era, risen to join the fray, and crossed paths with colorful characters. I hope these vignettes inspire readers of a certain age to muse on their parallel adventures and leave younger readers with a core message: Despite it all, life matters.