Ecology in an Era of Fragmentation.

An era has recently closed. It ran from roughly the end of the Cold War until now, although it has been in crisis for nearly a decade. Its basic logic took shape in the 1990s, but it reached its apex in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was an era of uniquely dominant American power—military, economic, cultural. the United States decided when and where to go to war—including, portentously, in Iraq in 2003. Wherever you went in those years, from Egypt to India to Indonesia, young people would tell you that they expected the future to be a certain kind of American world. Even in China, which very much had a sense of its own place on the global stage, I remember walking into a Shanghai bookshop in 2001 and encoun-tering an exhibition of an audio program for learning English, which was repeating this useful phrase: "We are looking forward to the closer trading relationship." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]