The 20th Century: What's Worth Saving?

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Mexican Murals

Some of the most life-affirming art ever created was painted on walls and the sides of buildings in Mexico during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s by muralists Diego Rivera (right), JosÈ Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Rivera's deeply indigenous, pre-Columbian motifs, Orozco's acid caricatures of modern life, and Siqueiros' turbulent, surreal images of class struggle all conveyed strong leftist viewpoints and launched a tradition of socially inspired public art. It lives on in the community murals that bring splashes of hope to inner-city neighborhoods north of the border.

Morphic Resonance Theory
Nature has its own sense of collective memory, British biochemist Rupert Sheldrake declared in his controversial 1981 book, A New Science of Life. Sheldrake theorizes that all objects, from hydrogen atoms to hurricanes, are surrounded by "morphic fields," which shape their behavior by connecting them to other hydrogen atoms and hurricanes through history in ways that science cannot yet measure. While that sounds crazy to us, think how educated 19th-century folks might have reacted to the idea of TV images being conveyed across the electromagnetic spectrum. The implications of this theory are staggering, from predicting the course of hurricanes to explaining dÈjvu. Sheldrake's thinking seems radical because he does not subscribe to orthodox scientific assumptions that the universe operates like a machine; instead, he sees it as more like a living organism.

Neon Lights
The first neon lamp--electricity shooting through a tube of neon gas--was put on public display in Paris in 1910 by inventor Georges Claude. Thirteen years later, Claude sold two custom-made signs to Earle C. Anthony for Anthony's Packard dealership in Los Angeles. Soon all Wilshire Boulevard was alight with "liquid fire." Defying darkness with streaks of color, neon adds an alluring dimension to evening street scenes.

New American Cuisine
Berkeley, the red-hot hub of movements for social change, set off a culinary revolution with the opening of Chez Panisse in 1971. Founded by Alice Waters, former food columnist for the underground San Francisco Express Times, the acclaimed restaurant showcases the bounty of organic and locally grown foods. Chez Panisse set the stage for a creative (and tasty) explosion of regional cooking across America and offered a four-star boost to sustainable agriculture. More than a thousand New American chefs are involved with the new Chefs Collaborative 2000 organization, which is promoting sustainable food choices for the next century.

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