Reform is in the air. Beware of it. Often it evaporates as the generation that spawned it moves on.

I take you back to the 1960s when reform was everywhere. We came out of that tumultuous decade with high hopes for a better deal. Some reform movements left a lasting effect, but others faded away.

Here, in no order, are what I see as the seminal reforming events of the ’60s.

The anti-Vietnam War movement; the environmental movement; the civil rights movement; the women’s movement; and the prison reform movement. Considering what’s happening on the streets of America now, it can be argued that the biggest disappointment was in civil rights, despite what’s been achieved.

To be sure, schools and colleges integrated, big institutions offered some colorblind promotion. Legislation guaranteeing civil rights, voting rights and banning overt segregation in housing, for example, was passed.

But social integration failed. After the riots of 1968, triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., whites left cities in droves for the suburbs. It was termed “white flight.”

Much of the civil rights legislation over time has been whittled away, particularly that associated with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It was often replaced with harsh policing and an attack on welfare.

It became a myth that The Great Society failed. It didn’t. The Great Society wasn’t given a fair shake before it was replaced with The Great Lockup Society.

Fear of drugs and related crime was greeted in the 1970s and 1980s with a philosophy that it was best to lock people up for a long time with mandatory sentencing and zero tolerance. The burden fell disproportionately on young African-American and Hispanic men.

The young people who’d marched around the White House in opposition to the Vietnam War, and belonged to what was called at the time “the new class,” were going to bring in a new society. They were articulate idealists who wanted a better world.

However as other problems gripped the national attention, like energy, the new class matured into the old class. They forgot the heady hopes of the ’60s when they’d dreamed of utopia.

Our politics hardened, too. The whole political apparatus moved to the right. If blacks were thought of at all by whites, it was as though their problems had been solved: Heck, there were black people all over television.

The big issues of healthcare and education weren’t addressed and if they were, the answer was unhelpful: private healthcare and private education.

We started graduating an almost unemployable class through the broken public-school systems. Then we said, “See, they’re unemployable, ignorant, and fit for a few minimum wage jobs like hamburger flipping.” If you are born into poverty and have little enlightened parenting at home, failure is nearly guaranteed.

Not only are we graduating students who can hardly read, but we aren’t telling them what reading is about: living a whole life.

My wife and I were filming a television program at the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, S.C., a few years ago. This private college should be a template for the future of small colleges. Students study liberal arts in tandem with a trade: blacksmithing, carpentry, classical architecture, plaster, stone carving and timber framing.

One student we interviewed — who was a little older than most college students (like most of the student body) — was an African American who had served in the Marine Corps. “What do you like about college?” I asked. “Dickens,” he replied.

He loved the literature component of the liberal arts education. Then, with a winning smile, he added, “They don’t teach that sort of thing in the high schools around here (Charleston).”

Students with a trade tend to start businesses. We were told that about a third of ACBA graduates start a small business within five years of graduation. Business is within the grasp of anyone who has a trade to sell like carpentry, stone carving or metal working.

Dignity is beyond price and it comes with success in small business. The key is the right kind of education: teaching down-home skills while lighting up the mind.

There is disquiet in the soul of America.

It has been expressed night after night on the streets of more than 100 towns and cities. That number of urban sites, with all those tens of thousands of people, are a cry from the hurting heart of America — yes, over the death of George Floyd, the proximate cause, but it is about more.

The demonstrations are the sum of multiple grievances that roil America: grievances over police excess; over the plight of those at the bottom with poor wages, little or no health care, and crushing debt from credit cards that they will never earn enough money to pay off in all of the years of their lives.

John Butler, professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, describes this debt as “technological sharecropping.”

It is the frustration that is the underside of the American Dream; the frustration that however hard one works, one will never escape the vise of debt, the squalor and degeneration of poverty with its cramping of the spirit and breaking of the will.

It is a well-founded sense of victimhood, for there are real victims — not only the victimhood of race, but also the pervasive victim status that settles upon all on the lowest rung of the economic ladder and even many rungs above, reaching well into the struggling middle class.

It is about despair: despair over money, despair over jobs, despair over squalor.

It is about agony that morphs into anger at not being heard, at being used but not respected — being the target of economic opportunity for those who own the corporations that seem to exploit, from the usurious pay-day lender to the large corporations that hide behind technology for comfort, to avoid confrontation, and to present any dispute as an assault on their right to do as they wish.

In this vein, it is the phone company that makes it onerous to report a fault on the line, the cable company that overcharges for its services, taking advantage of its natural monopoly status.

It is about the insurance company that sends you a computer-generated letter, assuring that you will not be able to deal with an individual, speak to a human being. (Bank of America will not give out phone numbers for officers.) The wretched must go in person to get near anonymous help.

It is knowing that the rich have numbers to call, specialists to see, detours around difficulties, and the glorious knowledge that they will have the more questionable of their deeds shielded from scrutiny.

It is about the rigorous greed of the few who must ensure their wellbeing through droves of lobbyists. It is about the taxes that the wealthy do not pay, and the unfortunate do pay.

It is about politicians who talk about freedom but perfect the freedom not to hear the whimpers of need from their constituents: their need for health care, employment security, affordable housing, and functioning schools. It is about a whole stratum of our society, from the very bottom to the middle, that feels that society has robbed them of everything, from respect to a hearing to simple dignity.

I have covered demonstrations, from those for self-government in colonial Africa to those against nuclear armament in London to the riots on the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington and Baltimore (they also went nationwide) to the repeated protests against the Vietnam War and the bombing of Cambodia.

There is in a demonstration a kind of camaraderie, a feeling of fellowship, a sense of human warmth and kindness that is powerful and invigorating — and, yes, intoxicating, which can trigger bad behavior. Sadly, if violence erupts, the demonstrators hand over the keys to their futures to those they are protesting.

The people in the streets are there not only because of police brutality, injustice and economic anguish but also in protest of the president of the United States.

Donald Trump has fanned the embers of differences between people, emboldened excesses in police forces and encouraged conflict over harmony, ridicule over appreciation, and introduced the vernacular of the street into the political dialogue.

It is oddly appropriate that it is in the street that Trump’s presidency is being reviled and where it may founder.

A plow breaks up the soil, turns it over. If seed is put down, that sprouts along with any other seed that happens to be there, weeds and other wild plants.

The new normal will be a plowed field where all sorts of innovations will spring forth. It will be a time of innovation, creativity and the growth of new products and ideas, as well as a few weeds (bad or greedily exploitive ideas).

Many who had what they believed to be steady jobs will become self-employed, dragooned by circumstance into the gig economy. And they will be the shock troops in an invasion of new inventions. At least that is my belief, and it is supported by empirical evidence that when there is turmoil, there is innovation.

Innovation has been on many lips since good things started to come out of Silicon Valley decades ago. The road to riches and to national predominance, it appeared, was through innovation. The rush was on. But it is one of those things, like happiness, that becomes harder to find the more you seek it.

Universities are busy designing courses in innovation. That is predictably opportunistic but probably futile. Imagine a professor teaching this basic innovation course: Quit your job, survive rejection, and work night and day on a hunch. Most people teaching are teaching because they are not risk-takers, and innovation is about risk-taking writ large.

Research, management and procedure are where the formal setting — the university — has its place. None of the great innovators felt the need to study innovation, from Henry Ford and Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs and the reigning king of innovation, Elon Musk.

It is from desire and necessity that innovation comes; before the venture capitalist has reached for a calculator, somewhere, somehow, someone has been working on an idea.

The great challenge of innovation in times of adversity is not creativity but money. Many great ideas are stillborn because money is harder to raise at such times. Financiers are not as brave as innovators. Still a plethora of good things came out of the 1930s, from musical theater to the Polaroid. These days there is more mobility of thought and, therefore, there will be more innovation.

In recent years, innovation has come to mean something to do with computing but that is not an exclusive path.

Sometimes innovation is simply seeing a better idea. In 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. That was an achievement involving a lot of vision, drive, innovation and money. The next year, something huge happened that involved none of the consuming effort of the space program: Wheels were added to luggage.

In 1984, Lee Iacocca produced the minivan. It was a classic example of exaptation — a term used in evolutionary biology to describe a trait that has been co-opted for a use other than the one for which natural selection has built it. That was true for the minivan: It was a regular van modified and repurposed.

Likewise, one of the few great, modern fortunes not associated with computers came from Greek yogurt. No invention there. The Greeks did that thousands of years ago. It was a good idea from a Turkish immigrant, Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and chief executive officer of Chobani.

Good ideas are the simplest and most direct way to innovation. Take cupholders in cars. It is extraordinary but true that cupholders began when the convenience store chain 7-Eleven started selling plastic brackets that affixed to your window to hold coffee. In no time, car companies were marketing cars based on the number of built-in cupholders. Not in luxury cars, not in great carriages had so simple a feature been added. That, too, was innovation. Of course, another invention, the throw-away beverage cup, helped.

The lesson is you can innovate, create Uber or Airbnb, if you understand computers. But you can also look around, as with wheels on luggage, cupholders, and Greek yogurt, and the true innovator will find products and services aplenty.

The message is, I believe, the true innovator looks around inside the box before venturing outside of it.

Tens of millions of Americans will be ferreting around seeking new and better ways to do things. Some will innovate in ways that will change things forever.

Snapshots. That’s what we have of the United States as we emerge tentative and fraught from lockdown.

We don’t have the whole picture, just snapshots of this and that.

Some of the snapshots are encouraging: The air is clearer, crime is down and a collective spirit is apparent in many places.

Others are more disturbing: The pandemic has become politicized.

Those to the right are demanding a total reopening of the economy; they’re abandoning masks and social distancing. And they’re using fragments of information to justify their cavalier attitude toward the great human catastrophe: They insist the government can’t tell them what to do, even if it endangers countless others.

The mainstream, meanwhile, reflects a cautious approach of phased-in reopening of the economy, masks, social distancing and sanitization.

Snapshot: People of middle age and older are conspicuously more cautious than the young.

Snapshot: Caution has no coherent spokesperson, unless you count New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Where, one wonders, is Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge President Trump in the 2020 race? He has, one reads, held dozens of election events, but his voice hasn’t been heard. (Can the liberal press be held accountable? Hardly.) Biden snapshot: a distant figure, out-of-focus.

Every time I catch a Biden speech, he’s talking about his family, his Pennsylvania roots, or the tragic loss of his son Beau to cancer. He hasn’t found the words that give strength to a distraught and suffering people.

If Biden has great ideas about the future, about how we will emerge from this terrible time, they haven’t been heard. Maybe he should hire a speechwriter; plenty of good newspaper people out of work.

Snapshot: A new federalism, as espoused by Trump: If it goes right, it’s my achievement. If it goes wrong, the governors are to blame: The buck never stops here.

More Trump snapshots: Obama is to blame; Mueller is to blame; China is to blame; inspectors general are to blame; villains at every turn.

Snapshot: Immigrants are heroes at the top and the bottom.

Every other doctor interviewed on television for their expertise about the pandemic, it seems, has an accent: That shows the power of immigrants in science. Immigrants also carry the load in the most dangerous job in the United States: meat processing and packing. It is high-risk, low-pay work.

The immigrant effect is encompassing and a source of value to all Americans.

Snapshot of healthcare: A system unequal to the job.

There are overworked and under-supplied healthcare workers, plus many patients who won’t be able to pay their hospital bills. Wait until the invoices start arriving across the country, spreading destitution. If the Supreme Court rules against Obamacare, the destitution will be complete: a black, financial hole swallowing millions of Americans.

Snapshot: The poor are poorly. Hispanics and African Americans are bearing the brunt of the financial pain, and a disproportionate number of infections. Because so many are on the lower rungs of the employment ladder, they’re completely out of money now, and may find they have no jobs to return to as restrictions lift. This may be the ugliest snapshot in the gallery.

Saddest snapshot: Americans lined up in the tens of thousands to get a handout from the food banks. Mostly, one sees long lines of cars waiting for bags of food. Those are the lucky ones: They have cars. The needy must walk.

Happiest snapshot: Science is back, despite the Trump administration’s attempts to hobble it.

The public wants medicines for many conditions, and the rush to find answers for COVID-19 will lead to many discoveries that will benefit other sufferers with other diseases. War spurs innovation, and that’s what we’re getting.

Hard-to-read snapshot: How many companies will survive? Will we have just one national airline? Fewer utility companies? Will retail and office space be on the market for decades? How many people will work from home full time going forward? A boom in self-employment, leading to many startups and innovations galore?

Interesting snapshot: Will the impressive governors and mayors who have emerged during the pandemic save us from the political mediocrity that characterizes the national scene? Check out Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D).

Keep snapping and wearing a mask, things will come into focus: good and bad.

A study envisioning how societies might address the complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic, undertaken by more than 70 leaders in innovation from around the world, is out.

It is the largest, nongovernmental study on the virus, and it paints a picture of a world recalibrated by it — with a heavy dependence on data in making people safer.

The study titled “Never Normal: A Call to Action to Address the New Realities Posed by COVID-19” is a clear-eyed look at the global future from the social pressure of prolonged separation — especially for young people — to stress in the food chain. The authorship is largely scientific and has been drawn from those who are charged with innovation in their work.

These authors, who plan to refine their suggestions and continue their work indefinitely, are banded together as the Cross-Industry Study Group. The group, whose members come from 12 countries (from the United States to Chile to Spain), owes its existence to one man: Omar Hatamleh, a scientist with NASA in Houston.

Hatamleh has been a chief innovation officer at the space agency. For the last four years, he has organized a conference on cross-industry innovation.

These conferences were dynamically different than most industry conferences: They did not discuss money or policy. Instead they concentrated on innovation in everything, from the future of buildings to how science is contributing to the creation of new video games, and how innovation is applied at the tech giants like Google and Facebook.

They celebrated, as does Hatamleh, exaptation — using an invention for one thing for an unrelated thing, like a medicine for cancer being used for Parkinson’s disease.

Hatamleh, the prime mover of the “Never Normal” study, and his deputy in the group, Dimitris Bountolos, a Chilean innovation consultant and former airline executive, drew on the creative talent from these conferences to gather the cross-industry group members and execute the study.

The group met remotely — and will continue to meet — in an intense three-week period during which they developed thousands of suggestions and explored as many ideas.

Gradually, they reduced these to two pertinent sections: one that delineates the challenges and the other that identifies the scientific way forward, with an emphasis on data and transparency.

“Never Normal” predicts a W-shaped future where there are waves of COVID-19, reflecting governments’ policies and social reaction. It also says the structures for resolution need to be created by governments and shared between them, so that freedom of movement can be restored, and governments do not poach technology and supplies from each other.

The study says the best hope for a proven vaccine is 12 to 24 months. It sees a great diminution in recreation — theaters and sports — as we know it. It predicts a digital future with intense social surveillance. It offers no panaceas, no silver bullets.

The study is emphatic about sanitation and looks at everything from new air-filtration technology for buildings to monitoring sewage to assess patterns of infection. The sewage does not need to have active virus particles to tell its tale, to show patterns, and to identify trends in infection.

The study sees a future where tracking is vital, using things like smart watches and sensors that are becoming ubiquitous with 5G telephone systems.

In one place, the study suggests that coughing can be identified by sensors and can direct authorities to potentially infected people who have not yet sought treatments. The study calls this “catching the cough.”

The study points to “air sterilization” as another innovative weapon in the COVID-19 fight.

The study states, “There are new nanotechnology-based on laser-induced graphene water filters that eliminate viruses and  bacteria in water. This new concept engineered for air filtration could be used in air filters in heating, ventilation and air conditioning or integrated into face masks for a self-sterilizing effect.”

This technology, it says, has the potential to be combined with state-of-the-art air filtration such as  HEPA filters.

Part of the significance of “Never Normal” is that it looks at the scientific contribution to stabilizing the world through a lens other than a purely medical one.

Its message: We need all the science we can get.

The lovelorn have computer dating: Cupid is digitized. But computer dating is not just for romantic love anymore.

An intriguing new company, founded by two computer professionals, is helping start-up companies find love with big enterprises. The results, so far, are wedding bells for a great variety of companies.

The matchmaker is Hunterz.io (yes, spelled with a “z”) and the proposition is straightforward: Start-ups register and are connected with the all-important “hunterz” — people who have worked for large enterprises and know the lay of the land inside.

They are people who have been laid off or have retired or are consultants; they make introductions and direct the start-up to the right people and right part of the large enterprise. Sometimes a hunterz is employed by a large entity, but mostly they are or were associated or employed there.

The co-founders of Hunterz.io are Noam Weisman, a veteran of giant Cisco Systems, and Yuval Shalev, who used to work for Deutsche Telekom, one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies.

Weisman told me that things were going well for the matchmaker before the coronavirus crisis, but there has been stratospheric growth since it began. “We have more than 10,000 hunterz on the platform, and we are active in 69 industries in 55 countries,” he told me. Although as a New York-based company, the emphasis is on North America, Weisman said.

An example of Hunterz.io at work is the successful linkup between Intellivisit, a Madison, Wis.,-based virtual health diagnostics company, and Rush Hospital in Chicago.

A hunterz made the introduction and Intellivisit found a role at the hospital. Weisman says that kind of linking is happening all the time to the benefit of the large enterprises and the start-ups. No more banging on closed doors, shooting off emails to unknown players who, as likely as not, will trash them.

This way willing start-ups and willing partners — investors or purchasers — meet each other.

“It was great to connect with some of the more innovative start-ups I have met,” said Kevin Serfass, manager of Global Telecom Partners. “My contacts appreciated me introducing these start-ups to them as they were in the process of looking for such solutions for a while now.”

Another hunterz, Othmar Knoll, an executive healthcare consultant, said, “Being a full-time consultant, it was a welcome change of pace to have vendors contact me for my services. Instead of me having to look for new vendors. It was simple and quick.”

To my mind Hunterz.io is the wave of the future — a wave I have been anticipating. New start-ups are likely to flood the market as we get to the “new normal.” That presumes that we will not suddenly revert to the status quo ante; that U.S. and global business will be dramatically restructured with new players, technologies and vision.

Since the beginning of business linking within the business sphere has been a problem. With Weisman’s company a new kind of efficiency has entered the marketplace.

Most of us have heard the plaintive, “Do you know anyone at this company? I think they would love my start-up, but I don’t know how to get their attention?” Or the equally sad, “I used to know someone whose wife worked there. Maybe she could help.”

As dating went from happenstantial to computer-matching so, too, businesses have always needed to know of each other. The big need the innovation of the small, and the small need the patronage of the big.

How many start-ups with wonderful product ideas have failed and left the field for want of an introduction?

Introductions are the oxygen of business and the more efficiently they can be made, the brighter the future looks — particularly at a time when, in so many ways, the future is cloudy.

After upheaval, like the current one, there is always innovation. But innovation needs to be known for it to find partners, patrons, purchasers.

When I was publishing magazines in New York in the 1960s, the struggle was to get a new magazine displayed on the 110,000 newsstands in the United States. We more-or-less bribed our way onto them.

Business has always had the equivalent of the newsstand problem: How do you tell them you are there?

Now they can find each other.

There is something fabulously exciting about watching science riding to the rescue.

The gloom about the coronavirus pandemic began to lift dramatically in the past several days as good news about vaccines came out.

Out front Oxford University, with a well-established history in vaccines, announced that it had started trials on people and that it might have a vaccine by September.

It has a manufacturing partnership with AstraZeneca, a giant European pharmaceutical company, and it is hoped that a million doses can be produced by September, even as there is not absolute certainty that it will work. Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at Oxford’s Jenner Institute, says she is “80 percent” certain that it will.

Incidentally, some tests on rhesus macaque monkeys were done at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana.

Labs in all major countries are in close pursuit of Oxford. What does seem certain is that the time when a viable vaccine can be brought to market is shrinking. The next challenge will be to manufacture proven vaccines in the hundreds of millions of doses needed.

To me the big thing is not who finds a vaccine, but rather how science answers the call to arms when the challenge is there — and financial support is provided. Much critical research in many of the coronavirus vaccine efforts has been provided not by governments, but by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

There is reason to wonder why Gates has been out in front of many governments, including the United States. This points to government failure to adequately support research and to prepare non-military defenses. Not every threat a modern nation faces comes from national armed forces.

Across the spectrum of research, private money is raised to do the work that should be in the government’s purview. Money for science is a struggle: There are competing philosophies, political and scientific, about research. To begin with, all research is messy.

The scientific method, as Michael Short of MIT reminded me recently, is based on try, fail, try again; test, prove, then proceed.

Conservatives have tended to be skeptical about a lot of science, pooh-poohing the study of obscure microbes and what they see as dubious investigation. They have consistently demanded quantifiable results from the government’s scientific establishment, looking for practical applications and unhappy about research for its own sake.

They have forgotten the real driver of all science: to know.

Liberals have favored, as you would expect, the social sciences over the hard ones. They are more prepared to treat social studies as science than high-energy physics.

What is lacking is something that we used to have in Congress: the Office of Technology Assessment, which was the scientific equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office. As with the often-quoted CBO, the OTA was a tool for members of Congress; a means for them to get complex scientific issues right and help them to understand the budgeting for those.

The OTA was created in 1972 and looked to be a firm part of the support system of Congress. But the Newt Gingrich-led House axed it in 1995. There have been several attempts to bring the OTA back in the House; last year a bill was introduced that would have re-established it at a modest $6 million, but no action was taken.

The OTA provided a valuable service in saving members of Congress from themselves; advising them when they come back from their constituencies believing hearsay as scientific fact — the same thing that has bedeviled President Trump in his briefings on the COVID-19 crisis.

I was well acquainted with the OTA and I always thought its greatest value was not in its formal advice, but rather in its informal help to members — who often confuse what they are told by sources as disparate as their children and lobbyists — from saying something about science that did not hold up.

As it is, we are all standing where we can see the scientific cavalry saddle up and ride out. This is heart-pumping, reassuring and confirms that science should not be neglected for budget or other reasons. To have a viable scientific infrastructure is to be defended from non-military attack, ranging from cybersecurity to a virus.

Scientists agree on this: There will be more.

The assumption is that we’ll return to work when COVID-19 is contained, or we have adequate vaccines to deal with it.

That assumption is wrong. For many millions, maybe tens of millions, there will be no work to which to return.

At root is a belief that the United States — and much of the world — will spring back as it did after the 2008 recession: battered but intact.

Fact is, we won’t. Many of today’s jobs won’t exist anymore. Many small businesses will simply, as the old phrase says, go to the wall. And large ones will be forced to downsize, abandoning marginal endeavors.

When we think of small businesses, we think of franchised shops or restaurants and manufacturers that sell through giants like Amazon and Walmart. But the shrinkage certainly goes further and deeper.

Retailing across the board is in trouble, from the big-box chains to the mom-and-pop clothing stores. The big retailers were reeling well before the coronavirus crisis. Neiman Marcus, an iconic luxury retailer, has filed for bankruptcy. All are hurt, some so much so — especially malls — that they may be looking to a bleak future.

The supply chain will drive some companies out of business. Small manufacturers may find that their raw material suppliers are no longer there or that the supply chain has collapsed — for example, the clothing manufacturer who can’t get cloth from Italy, dye from Japan or fastenings from China.

Over the years, supply chains have become notoriously tight as efficiency has become a business byword.

Some will adapt, some won’t be able to do so. A record 26.5 million Americans have sought unemployment benefits over the last five weeks. Official unemployment numbers have always been on the low side as there’s no way of counting those who’ve given up, those who work in the gray economy, and those who for other reasons, like fear of officialdom or lack of computer skills, haven’t applied for unemployment benefits.

To deal with this situation the government will have to be nimble and imaginative. The idea that the economy will bounce back in a classic V-shape is likely to prove illusory.

The natural response will be for more government handouts. But that won’t solve the systemic problem and will introduce a problem of its own: The dole will build up dependence.

I see two solutions, both of which will require political imagination and fortitude.

First, boost the gig economy (contract and casual work) and provide gig workers with the basic structure that formal workers enjoy: Social Security, collective health insurance, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation.

The gig worker, whether cutting lawns, creating websites, or driving for a ride-sharing company, should be brought into the established employment fold; they’re employed but differently.

Second, a new Works Progress Administration should be created using government and private funding and concentrating on the infrastructure.

The WPA, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, ended up employing 8.5 million Americans, out of a total population of 127.3 million, in projects ranging from mural painting to bridge building.

Its impact for good was enormous. It fed the hungry with dignity, not the soup kitchen and bread line, and gave America a gift that has kept on giving to this day.

Jarrod Hazelton, a Rhode Island-based economist who’s researched the WPA, says the agency gave us 280,000 miles of repaired roads, almost 30,000 new and repaired bridges, 600 new airports, thousands of new schools, innumerable arts programs, and 24 million planted trees.

It also enabled workers to acquire skills and escape the dead-end jobs they’d lost. It was one of the most successful public-private programs in all of history.

As the sea levels rise and the climate deteriorates, we’ll need a WPA, tied in with the Army Corps of Engineers, to help the nation flourish in the decades of challenge ahead. The original was created by FDR with a simple executive order.

On the face of it, there isn’t much to celebrate on April 22, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. The oceans are choked with invisible carbon and plastic, which is very visible when it washes up on beaches and fatal when ingested by animals, from whales to seagulls.

On land, as a run-up to Earth Day, Mississippi recorded its widest tornado — two miles across — since measurements were first taken, and the European Copernicus Institute said an enormous hole in the ozone over the Arctic has opened after a decade of stability.

But perversely, there’s some exceptionally good news. Because of the cessation of so much activity, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the air has cleared dramatically; cities around the world, including Mumbai and Los Angeles, are smog-free. Also, the murk in the waters of Venice’s canals and the waves from motorboats are gone, revealing fish and plants in the clear Adriatic water.

Jan Vrins, global energy leader at Guidehouse, the world-circling consultancy, was so excited by the clearing that he posted and tweeted a picture taken from a town in the Punjab where Himalayan peaks are visible for the first time in 30 years.

The message here is very hopeful: With some moderation in human activity, we can save the environment and ourselves.

The sense of gloom and hopelessness that has attended a litany of environmental woes needn’t be inevitable. Mitigating conduct in industry and, particularly in the energy sector, can have huge effect quickly; transportation will take longer. Vrins says the electric utility industry — a source of so much carbon — is now almost entirely engaged in the fight against global warming. Just five years ago, he says, they weren’t all fully committed to it.

Another Guidehouse consultant, Matthew Banks, is working with large industrial and consumer companies on reducing the effect of packaging as well as the energy content of consumer goods. Among his clients are Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson. The latter, he says, has been working to reduce product footprint since 1995.

“This is an important moment in time,” Banks says. “Folks have talked about this as being The Great Pause, and I think on this Earth Day we need to think about how that bounce back or rebound from the Great Pause can be done in a way that responds to the climate crisis.”

I was on hand covering the first Earth Day, created by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson and its national organizer, Denis Hayes. It came as a follow-on to the environmental conscientiousness that arose from the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring” in 1962. That dealt with the devastating effect of the insecticide DDT.

Richard Nixon gave the environmental movement the hugely important National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. With that legislation, and the support of people like Nelson, the environmental movement was off and running — and sadly, sometimes running off the rails.

One of the environmentalists’ targets was nuclear power. If nuclear was bad, then something else had to be good. At that time, wind turbines — like those we see everywhere nowadays — hadn’t been perfected. Early solar power was to be produced with mirrors concentrating sunlight on towers. That concept has had to be largely abandoned as solar-electric cells have improved and the cost has skidded down.

But in the 1970s, there was reliable coal, lots of it. As the founder and editor in chief of The Energy Daily, I sat through many a meeting where environmentalists proposed that coal burned in fluidized-bed boilers should provide future electricity.

Natural gas and oil were regarded as, according to the inchoate Department of Energy, depleted resources. Coal was the future, especially after the energy crisis broke with the Arab oil embargo in the fall of 1973.

Now there is a new sophistication. It was growing before the coronavirus pandemic laid the world low, but it has gained in strength. As Guidehouse’s Vrins says, “We still have climate change as a ‘gray rhino’, a big threat to our society and the world at large. I hope that utilities and all their stakeholders will increase their urgency of addressing that big threat which is still ahead of us.”

Happy birthday Earth Day — and many more to come.

 

 

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Photo: President Richard Nixon and First Lady Pat Nixon plant a tree on the White House South Lawn to recognize the first Earth Day.

I’m just old enough to remember Victory in Europe Day (May 8, 1945), formally recognizing the end of World War II in Europe. My family was in Cape Town: My father served in the Royal South African Navy, then under the command of the Royal Navy.

The jubilation was intense; nothing I’ve seen has touched it in its unrestricted joy. Strangers really did hug and kiss each other. I was hugged and kissed as though I’d personally borne the battle as a toddler.

Apart from joy and relief, the end of war in the Free World had another consequence: It liberated people from class and economic structures that had inhibited creativity.

Under the pre-war rigidities, those lower in the social system didn’t have the temerity or the opportunity to add to the innovation that created the peace prosperity that marked the 1950s.

The working class — now regarded as being part of the middle class — had been thought as destined to a lesser social standing; certainly not expected to invent, create and go into business. After the war, more things were possible.

Innovation was for everyone and it showed in everything, from the building of Levittown on New York’s Long Island and its descendants, to the civilian uses of nuclear power, the arrival of FM radio and color television, revolving credit and, oh, the miniskirt.

In the last 30 years the universal nature of innovation has come to mean advances, incredible advances, in computing and industries transformed by computing — take public transportation and scooters and ride-sharing.

The creation of wealth through innovation has been largely in the province of computing. But in the last several decades it was the innovation of bringing Greek yogurt to the United States that led to a billion-dollar fortune.

When the scourge of COVID-19 has passed, the nation will be a different place, changed dramatically from the way it was. It won’t have — to use the business school analogy — a classic V-curve recovery where things bounce back to where they’d been before.

Many weak industries will be severely contracted, including movie theaters, retailers, restaurants, and small colleges and universities. This will throw a great deal of talent out of work. Those are the people, I believe, who will create a new innovative wave in society and bring about a new prosperity, after some very hard times.

The internet provides new entrepreneurs an opportunity to draw attention to products and services that would have faced a marketing roadblock in another generation.

Big industry, too, will innovate, not the least to shore up its defenses against another national crisis.

The electric utilities, which have been on the front line of the essential services during the COVID-19 horror, will be seeking to further harden their systems against disruptions from cyberattack, physical attack or other failure, which could produce a huge crisis.

Already, Michelle Fay of the forward-looking consulting firm Guidehouse is looking to this innovative future to strengthen the electric industry. She says, “Innovation will emerge as an even bigger opportunity as we look to improve the resiliency of the critical infrastructure and further enhance our ability to provide business continuity in times like this.”

Michael Short, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, points out an accompanying development. He says on a recent edition of my television program, “White House Chronicle,” the current crisis looks as though it’ll bring back respect for expertise.

It seems to me that this disrespect has been prevalent since the 1960s, when so many of our social troubles — environment, civil rights, women’s rights and the Vietnam War — were laid at the feet of experts and the institutions that employed them.

The crisis has shown that hearsay medicine and what I call “voodoo science” won’t help in a crunch. Solid science and good medicine are the only way.

Now I’m seeing the shoots of new businesses sprouting, from people making jewelry at home to sell on Etsy to grocery delivery services. Expect a surge of books and plays. Crisis produces new product, creates new business, causes new thinking.

My friend Morgan O’Brien, who is well-credentialed in innovation as the co-founder of Nextel and now at the helm of Anterix, a critical communications network provider, says innovation doesn’t come easy.

“The inertia that pulls all human efforts earthward, and the pain of looking past the ‘very difficult’ to spy the ‘barely possible’; these are the obstacles to bringing innovation into the world, bloody and bruised, only to be immediately beset by doubts and fears,” he says.

Innovation is coming on a grand scale, some of it as complex as  O’Brien’s vision for cell phones or as simple as, my favorite, wheels on luggage. Get ready.