Dec. 31, 2002, 5:23PM

By DOUG SANDAGE

STUDIES show that newspaper opinion pages appeal in large part to middle-aged mainstreamers. If you're reading this, you may well be a baby boomer. My generation has "had it our way" for the past half-century. But an uneasy feeling now afflicts many of us: Maybe the party's over.

So I hope this season finds you in the mood not only for retrospection but also for resolution. Because we can make our lives really count for something. We've got a chance that will never come again.

It's the chance to decide whether our children will have a future -- in any way we'd like to use that word. To be timely and topical, I could mention that scientists reported just a few days ago that the famous snows of Kilimanjaro will all melt by 2015. But news like that is pretty bland, when chunks of Antarctica as big as Rhode Island are floating our way.

And the crisis of this young century goes beyond flooding a few million square miles of coastal land. I won't dress it up with eco-lingo. We're using up the world. "We" means you and me -- the millions of boomers who are each consuming more resources than royalty did just a century ago. There's no reason to blame ourselves; it's the life we grew up with, the only life we know.

No, it's not our fault, but it is a fact. Both Edward O. Wilson and Richard Leakey, equally famous in their respective fields of biology and paleontology, agree that we stand to lose, within 100 years, half the plant and animal species that existed just 50 years ago. The last such extinction process took out the dinosaurs -- and the web of life is vanishing far faster today than it did then.

Call me a tree-hugger, but don't forget the trees hug back. "Earth Day" isn't about the Earth, which can shrug off the human species the way we shrug off a bad cold. It's about not being shrugged off. And it's about rising above our pampered past and salvaging a decent material and spiritual life for our children.

Yes, I said "spiritual." At its root, the current crisis arises from our refusal to take our places as creatures made by a higher power that I dare to call God.

Our refusal is hardly news. The story of Adam and Eve is as much about us as it was about them. We even made a new god called Science, so we could play god with the world. And when Science started to tell us that we were playing too rough, we made yet a newer god: the free market. No nagging. In Gold we trust.

We won't find the answers on Wall Street, or under the Capitol dome that Wall Street now owns. The answers will emerge only from our own hearts, and from under the domes of our churches, temples and mosques.

Abraham Lincoln's era allowed him to invoke the Almighty as more than a nod to a powerful interest group. And his words about the crisis of the Civil War ring true today: "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We shall nobly save -- or meanly lose -- the last, best hope of Earth."

So at this time of resolutions, look down into your own heart, and up to whatever you call heaven. Let's change our own lives, take our places in creation and save the last, best hope of Earth. Let's go down in history as heroes.

Or would we rather be remembered in a different way?

Sandage is an attorney-mediator and a student at Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology in Dallas.

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2003