At exactly the time I should have been paying the closest attention, Florida was suffering probably the biggest environmental disaster in its history. It happened on my watch but I wasn't watching.

During the early 1990s through 1995, 38 percent of the once-abundant living coral in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary had died.

WASHINGTON -- We often wonder how people of the past, including the most revered and refined, could have universally engaged in conduct now considered unconscionable. Such as slavery. How could the founders, so sublimely devoted to human liberty, have lived with -- some participating in -- human slavery? Or fourscore years later, how could the saintly Lincoln, an implacable opponent of slavery, have nevertheless spoken of and believed in African inferiority?

Skeptics about democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries argued that the enfranchised masses would use their votes to seize the property of the relatively few rich. What could be more natural?