Is This the End? History from Taticus to The Doors and Sandra

Very interesting meditation on time and the river(s) flowing by James Atlas in The New York Times, entitled "IsThis the End?"  A sample:

"History is a series of random events organized in a seemingly sensible order. We experience it as chronology, with ourselves as the end point — not the end point, but as the culmination of events that leads to the very moment in which we happen to live."

Yet: "Every civilization must go. "  He contiues, after quoting Tacitus about a  eruption Mt. Vesuvius: " But of course it wasn’t the end of the world: it was just the end of them."

Atlas also quotes New York governor Governor Cuomo:  “'we have a 100-year flood every two years now,' which doesn’t stop rents from going up in Battery Park City. "

The message?  Is it too late to stop the rising tides? Or is time to think about moving on?

And by the way, what was the ecological damage of all that defoliation in Vietnam? We got out of it, can we get out of our current messes?