Next Stop - The 21st Century

As we enter the next century, we need to be mindful of the landscapes that produce the food we eat. And companies need to make sure that, in relocating to places where people can enjoy the wonders of nature, they don't destroy those wonders in the process.

William Cronon (wcronon@facstaff.wisc.edu) sparked controversy in 1995 with an essay in the New York Times Magazine: "The Trouble with Wilderness." His most recent book, "Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature" (Norton, 1995), looks at cultural attitudes toward nature. In 1992, Cronon left a tenured position at Yale University so that he could return to his hometown of Madison, Wisconsin.

Cheick Diarra

Program manager,
Mars Exploration Program
Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA
Pasadena, California

You can't talk about the 21st century without talking about space. Within a decade, travel to and from outer space will be quick and easy. Combine this access with technologies that enable people to do things in space cheaply and effectively, and you see that the opportunities for private initiative become endless. Space is the next entrepreneurial frontier.

Here's one small example: Within three months of the Pathfinder landing on Mars, our Web page had received 500 million hits. What if a company, rather than the government, had built that craft and had taken it to Mars? This company could have charged, say, 50 cents a hit for Web access to images. It could have sold the data that it collected to scientists. In just a year, it would have paid for the cost of the mission -- which for NASA was $258 million.

The allure of space travel changed my life. I grew up in the Sahara Desert. I'd get up in the morning and listen to Voice of America broadcasts about the Apollo program. I was so inspired that I decided to study hard at school. Eventually, I ended up at NASA. But space does more than just inspire us. It encourages us to think about how we can come together to work on issues that affect everyone.

The only limit to the development of our planet is our collective intelligence -- the total amount of brainpower that the Earth has at its disposal. There's never been a better time to leverage technologies -- the Web, satellite-based communication, videoconferencing -- to expose everyone on the planet to what its best minds have to offer. Somewhere in the Kalahari Desert is a boy or a girl who might have what it takes to unlock the mystery of cancer. We can reach him or her through space.

Cheick Diarra (cheick.m.diarra@jpl.nasa.gov) grew up in Mali, West Africa. He has worked on the Pathfinder mission to mars, the Magellan mission to venus, the Ulysses mission to the poles of the sun, and the Galileo mission to jupiter.

Natialie Angier

Author, "Woman: An Intimate Geography"
Takoma Park, Maryland

What's the wave of the future? Economic parity between men and women. The world is too competitive to support a class of people who aren't working to their full capacity. Most families today need two incomes -- not only to raise children but also to support them through many years of education. Equality of income between the sexes has gone beyond being fair. It is a necessity.

How do we get there? First, by getting men to share responsibility for raising children. I can't find much evidence to support the proposition that women are naturally more nurturing than men. Men can love children every bit as "maternally" as women can. The more time that men spend with infants -- holding them, smelling them -- the more the men's circuits of affiliation are aroused. But many of my women friends have a problem with letting go. They feel that they are better nurturers than men are; they laugh at their husbands for being awkward. If women have that attitude, men don't have a chance.

We need to do two other things: to pay attention to gender biases, and to learn what Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, calls "reconciliation behaviors." Here's an example: Women at MIT collected data on things like differences in the lab and office space allocated to men and to women. They showed that there was systematic (but largely unconscious) discrimination. MIT officials acknowledged the problem, apologized, and went about setting things right.

The ability to realize when we are wrong -- and to correct the problem -- is one of the most important skills that we can master as we move into the new century.

Natalie Angier (angier@nytimes.com) covers science for the New York Times. She has won a Pulitzer Prize for her work there. "Woman: An Intimate Geography" (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) looks at the full scope of female biology.