Jan. 1, 2000, is finally here. The doomsday scenario proved to be somewhat exaggerated. Since most of us have survived without so much as a flickering of the lights, we’re preparing to carry on as usual: singlemindedly, short-sightedly.

But wait! This may not really be the first day of the Third Millennium of the Common Era, but it’s certainly a vantage point, and we’d be well advised to study the view in both directions. Most of us treat history with caution, not wanting to be accused of revisionism. If ever there was a time to look back with a critical eye, though, this is it. What have we done? What should we have done differently, and is there yet time to correct our mistakes?

Perhaps our worst error lies in taking the short view, both in hindsight and in foresight. Too often, we can’t see past the ends of our noses; at our most insightful, we’re rarely able to see past the end of our own lives.

"But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs," wrote British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1923. "In the long run we’re all dead."

Yes, we are, and Keynes is dead now, although he lived to see the stock market collapse. The depression that followed is a lesson too many of us have written off as ancient history. History has a long memory, though. The first human inhabitants of this land are dead, but the ways in which they modified their environment remain apparent. Cliff dwellings, we’ve learned, can withstand the passage of centuries. Uranium mill tailings are forever.

It hasn’t been so very long since America seemed limitless. Since then, we’ve speckled it with houses, criss-crossed it with fences, pipelines and power lines, and continued to use non-renewable resources under the assumption that new ones would be identified. True as that assumption may be, the earth itself is finite. Our population is increasing rapidly; the raw materials available to us cannot.

We must stop being defensive in our planning processes, which have a single goal: to preserve our own options. We must quit thinking that the public lands in our back yards are ours alone. Yes, we have better insights into how they should be managed, but we also have vested interests in continuing to manage them for our own favored uses. At the end of the 20th century, we still don’t share well.

We must quit believing that we’re "owed" government services and that a mythical "someone else" will pay the bill while we complain about government interference. We must quit believing that there’s a cure for every ill, that we can buy or take everything we want, experience all the world has to offer, live for today and let the devil take tomorrow.

For many centuries we’ve enjoyed the bounty of a small sphere that was well-stocked before we got our hands on it. We’ve survived, clinging to its thin skin as it hurtled through space, by gouging out what we thought we needed. Now the wear is beginning to show, and yet our sense of entitlement grows ever greater. We’re in a precarious position.

Public utilities for heat, light and communication are relatively new developments. Fifty years ago, no one had television. It’s only been in the past few years that computers controlled our lives. Yet in that short span of time, we’ve grown unable to function without them. We grow very nervous at the prospect of losing what none of our ancestors even could have imagined; we’re no longer very good at survival.