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The Long Game: Facing Reality in the Environmental Century

Stephen Mulkey
7 min readJun 3, 2018

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Ancient glacial landscape in Canadian Rockies. 2004. Photo by Stephen Mulkey

Personally, I would rate the likelihood of staying under two degrees of warming as under 10 percent. — Michael Oppenheimer 2017

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. — Thomas Merton

Under a concrete sky on 5 November 2014, Michele and I awoke to realize that Paul LePage had been re-elected as governor of Maine. Once again, Mainers had split their votes three ways and LePage was elected by a minority of the voters to another four-year term. We were deeply disappointed because during his first term LePage had made clear his disdain for anything related to the environment, frequently referring to the Natural Resources Council of Maine and its members as the enemy. Little did we know that the next few years would make LePage’s first term look like the good old days.

Michele and I moved to Maine in 2011 when I assumed my job as president of Unity College in rural Unity, Maine. Maine has many progressive and brilliant people dedicated to making the state and its people better. Their work goes…

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Stephen Mulkey
Stephen Mulkey

Written by Stephen Mulkey

Environmental scientist and educator; forest and climate change ecologist.

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