There's so much to talk about.

So let's just start talking about, ah, well, where I live and go where it goes, because where we live is the starting point for everything: life, the future, our children, our hopes, our fears.

I'm sitting here looking out my 'office' window in a small bedroom at the front of the house. The window looks out on a short crescent that's more of an "L" really, a shortcut for cars at school hours looking to avoid the crossing guards and 4-way stops in the larger intersection just around the corner.

The crescent is the artery of a small development of about 20 similar houses built back in the late 1970s. That was just before the town of Milton had to stop all — literally, and for what turned out to be more than 30 years — all new construction because of a natural limit, the supply of potable water available.

You see, Milton's water at that time came from wells on the nearby Niagara Escarpment and in the late 70s while large areas of southern Ontario all around Milton were sprawling, Milton reached the limit of its water supply. There just was no more available, so construction stopped.

Dead.

It made Milton an aberration, a small town just outside Toronto with a fairly steady population (around 30 thousand) and a lifestyle from, seemingly, another era. When I moved to Milton in 1994, it reminded me of early 70s Lindsay where I went to high school. Although bigger, Milton had the same feeling of a small, rural Ontario town rooted in its location and history.

Coupled with the Niagara Escarpment just there on the horizon for hiking, and a Saturday morning farmer's market for local vegetables and Niagara fruit, it was a pleasant and unique community. The only traffic jams happened when commuters spilled off nearby Highway 401, trying to bypass the not infrequent accident backups on that 6-lane artery. There wasn't much in the way of retail shopping or entertainment, but it was just a short drive to the sprawling malls of Oakville, Burlington and Mississauga, and just 40 minutes from downtown Toronto.

Sound idyllic? Perhaps not for everyone but my wife and I enjoyed our part of that time.

But that's the way it was.

Today, Milton's the fastest growing community in Canada and that's official, I read it in the Toronto Star. And the Globe. And the Post. Milton's population has significantly more than doubled in just 7 years, the result of a development frenzy finally unleashed by the end of the town's natural water limit. In 2001, the regional government installed a 2-metre diameter big pipe that draws water into the town from Lake Ontario, about 25 kilometres to the south. With a now 'practically unlimited' water supply, town council was ecstatic and the developers who had locked up much of the land surrounding the town were off to the races.

The new water flooded across the town's outskirts, scouring off a 150-year-old landscape of southern Ontario farm fields and washing up against the Escarpment. New retail started coming in, great gobs of it, including a WalMart, a modern Canadian Tire, Staples, etc., etc. Services too, including décor chain restaurants like Montana's, even a movie theatre. And factories and commercial buildings in the industrial area on the north side of town for employment growth. Town Council and the Mayor crowed at each new development, each new announcement of 'progress'.

It was like a time lapse movie. Having lost the immunity of a natural limit, we were living through a compressed version of what so many other North American communities have undergone. Sprawl. Homogenization. Inadequate planning. Leapfrog development. Morning and evening traffic jams became the norm. The farmer's market got crowded and stalls could be out of produce if you got there too late. But retail shopping trips got shorter, and going to the cinema became a local reality, not a 25-minute drive. Even the complexion of the town began to change. What had been white bread began to exhibit notes of colour and ethnic flavourings, though not yet anywhere near the diverse exuberance of Toronto and Mississauga.

While they say progress is inevitable, as I look out my window and think about Milton's recent growth, I have to wonder how do you know it's progress? and are you sure? and progress towards what?

And what does the very notion entail in a world that has come to its ecological limits while celebrating the advent of ever more destructive "achievements". We are embedded in a fantasy of progress that ends in its own irrelevance. The eco-systems collapse down around our shoulders. An economy triumphant but doomed by its own success.

We are embedded in it.

I mean, look around and see if you don't wonder just how skewed is our understanding of the environment and economy that, by and large, and even faced with incontrovertible proof that we have willingly walked to the edge of the chasm, the celebration of Milton's joining the rest of North America in the soul-bland cancer of automobiles, power malls, and endless consumption, cannot be challenged. Growth is good by definition and consumption is both the means and the goal. As for conservation, as Dick Cheney said, that's nothing but an antiquated virtue from long gone days.

Yet it must be challenged. Not to pick on Milton, it just happens to be where I live and so is what I know, Milton's growth is just one more blind repetition of a development pattern that we already know is not sustainable and that cannot survive the next 50-100 years of facing up to the natural limits of this planet. We know we must change yet here we are building infrastructure and houses and communities that are already obsolete but will last well into the uncertain future that is bearing down on us. As Scotty on Star Trek might have said, it's like swimming with concrete galoshes. It's great if you succeed but I don't like your chances.

And in my worst moments, I don't much like our chances either. The issues facing us are complex, interconnected, and challenge the entire economic, political, social and moral core of this and every society on Earth. The changes we must make go far beyond an inconvenient truth to the overwhelming reality that we are already living in the future, we are already manifesting it by the real consequences of the choices we make every day, by the challenges of being the dominant and still growing species on a planet with shrinking resources and diminishing capacity to absorb our impacts. And whatever future we create by our actions or inactions, we will live into that future. So it's not just that our children will inhabit the future. And our grand children.

We will too.

We are already embedded in the future.

And that's where I live. Embedded in the Town of Milton in the Region of Halton of the Province of Ontario in the nation of Canada on the North American continent of the lovely blue-sheathed orb glittering in the darkness of space that is our common future.

Pretty much the same place as you, right?