True story: a son once walked into his parents' home to find his mother and his father, C.S. Lewis, scholar, Christian and Narnian, awash in tears. Inquiring as to what was the matter his father quickly assured his boy that everything was all right; they had just been reading Housman,^[1] and they always cried when reading Housman.

A Shropshire Lad was kind of a totem for the Lost Generation, referenced as such by George Orwell, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ernest Hemingway, et al.

Of course, it made no sense to sonny-boy, he of the G.I. Generation, whose totem may have been Roosevelt or Churchill.

And yet to the next set of lads and ladies, it might have seemed strange for someone to weep at the words of these respective icons of liberalism and conservatism. Bob Dylan, on the other hand, well, as they say, I guess we wouldn't understand.

The operative 'we' of course being the "Thirteenth Generation,"^[2] better known as Generation X, the last of whom are now about to turn 30.^[3]

The guys and gals who got us to today

Last week, I had to opportunity to attend my fifth WEFTEC show. It was still the same show we've come to know and rely on – the largest for our industry in North America – but this year there was something I noticed that was a little different.

For one, until now, I always did these things accompanied by our esteemed editor Roy Bigham. A consummate baby boomer, for those of you who don't know Roy, he is, quite simply, the greatest asset our magazine has. Not only does he retain an encyclopedic knowledge of all things environmental – the guy was taking samples 20 years before I was even a microbe – but he is possessed of an uncanny ability to see right through the vicious debates that haunt our industry and surprise with a heretofore unthought-of, yet entirely logical reconciliatory opinion.

Roy was on the field when the Clean [name of classical element] Acts, and their subsequent major amendments, kicked off the modern era of environmental control. He remembers the time before the environmental era, the reasons behind the regulations, and all the bumbling and fumbling and innovation and mistakes and ideals and dumb luck that got us from the crest of the 1960s to the gathering tsunami of the early 21st century.

As for me, well, I got this gig in 2003 by being considerably cleverer with a semicolon than a CEMS. So it was a big thing this fall to be flying solo, taken temporarily from my fact-checking and alliterations, and tasked with taking the temperature of today's air, water and wastewater management industries.

Summer of '69? I wasn't even born!

Standing at once in the pre-morning twilight of the 2010s and the fluorescent pall of the Orange County Convention Center, it dawned on me that I was hardly the only person on the floor who, e.g., didn't have to squint at his Blackberry^[4] from arm's length.

This year's mean attendee had become quite noticeably younger. That is, the expert men and women in their early middle ages, whose hands I pumped and presentations I annotated, were, like me, born into a world in which pro football was played exclusively in the NFL, the Beatles had broken up, man had walked on the moon, and U.S. environmental policy was conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency.^[5] We have no recollection of a time before computers, nor have we ever seen a calendar without Earth Day.^[6]

And there, for the first time, I imagined what our industry would be like without Roy, and the rest of the Founding Generation of the modern environmental industry.

I was both scared and excited at this emerging reality: that fingers which never punched a typewriter would soon be the ones holding the reigns of our vital yet unsung trade. That those tasked with shaping our regulatory future would be those who believed in the flux capacitor and Mr. Fusion^[7] before we even heard of flowmeters and catalytic converters.

Meet the Baby Busters

What would this future, in the hands of the erstwhile purveyors of grunge mix-tapes and tips for warping to World 8-1,^[8] actually look like?

The precedent for immediate post-Founder generations in history is not good. The generation that followed Washington, Adams and Jefferson inherited their forefathers' ideologies but not their spirit of cooperation, allowing differences of opinion to escalate into conflict and political bullying, setting us on a course toward civil war. Business studies have remarked on the low success rate for company executives replacing founders (although I know plenty of very successful second-gen CEOs and presidents in our industry who would be stark, if anecdotal, exceptions to this so-called "trend.")

Is that to be us? Already we have seen the beginnings of discord rippling through the highly charged political climate in which our businesses exist. We are, after all – at least according to our generalizers – the generation that'll "believe it when we see it," which seems pretty inconducive to the confederative spirit called for in undertakings as gargantuan, as, say, saving the planet.^[9]

And we know this because we get caught all the time saying things like "Whoever's in charge of the weather in Michigan must not have heard of global warming, because it's c-o-o-o-old!" Like if it isn't El Niño-ing in Metro [Name of Hometown] today, it isn't happening.

On the other hand, skepticism is essential for good science. And the other traits we've been associated with – and '80s- and '90s-infused reliance on individual achievement, savvy, and practicality – are quite conducive to innovation. So we may not be as good at the agreeing on things, but there's pretty good hope that we can pull our weight and then some in the advancement end of things.

There's still plenty of time for us to learn what we can from the founding generation of environmental professionals, before it is left to us to carry on their work and impart their knowledge on the generation after us.^[10]

And of course, if our own collective totem – that being, of course, Luke Skywalker and co. – is any indication, we may just have the imagination it's gonna take to face the oncoming wave of new environmental challenges.^[11]PE

References:

1.When I was one-and-twenty,
     I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
     But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
     But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
     No use to talk to me

2. […since the founding of the United States]

3. Now you get the headline, right?

4. Actually, it's an iPhone. I finally cracked over this past summer.

5. The current administrator of which was – ready for it? – eight years old when it started.

6. Metaphorically, people! – please don't e-mail me your 2003 Far Side calendar with a manifestly blank 4/22

7. Steven Speilberg's "Back to the Future," Parts I and II, respectively

8. i.e. Level 8, board 1 of Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System. We highly recommend getting the Fire Flower power-up first.

9. "Saving the planet" is a cliché that we have known since birth. We even had a campy-as-all-getup cartoon superhero dedicated to this singular objective, which to my knowledge, has yet to be achieved, but if it ever were, I have a headline all picked out already.

10. Who – get this – probably in their lives will communicate by text message more often than by telephone!

11. Excessive end-quoting by a member of Generation X is usually a good sign that person has been reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which at this moment is probably the seminal literary achievement on the subject of environmentalism (and competitive tennis) yet produced by my generation, and it is highly recommended you read this.