This issue's many articles on environmental chemistry reminded me that during the decade following 1965, the year when I began teaching, it was popular to extrapolate various growth curves to the year 2000. Often the results were startling. Projections that world population would double by the end of the century led ecologists to talk of a "population bomb". Problems were anticipated as a result of consumption of limited resources, pollution of air, water, and land, destruction of ecosystems and habitat, increasing poverty and famine, and other environmental or social issues. Arguments for action were often prefaced by "Do you realize that in the year 2000...".

In 1970 this was a striking way to point out that rates of change were accelerating and that change is not necessarily beneficial. With the year 2000 on our doorstep, it is appropriate to revisit the 1960s and 1970s, looking for milestones that mark not only problems but also progress. A little reflection reveals that chemistry has contributed to alleviating many of the problems, and substantial progress has been made in chemistry and chemical education.

Instrumentation now plays a far more important role. When I was an undergraduate, my student colleagues and I complained that we were not permitted to use the department's brand new IR spectrophotometer to help solve our qual organic unknowns. When I was a graduate student, the department's one NMR instrument was operated by a faculty member and reserved for research. In this issue there is a paper about pervasive incorporation of NMR throughout an undergraduate curriculum. Other undergraduate colleges have similar programs - even using NMR in courses for non-science majors. Many other instruments that were to be found only in a few research labs in 1965 are now essential to the education of undergraduates.

There are now far more opportunities for face-to-face interactions with others who are interested in chemical education. The first Biennial Conference on Chemical Education took place in 1970 at Snowmass-at-Aspen, Colorado. The first CHEMED conference was in 1973 at the University of Waterloo, Canada. These conferences have grown steadily, attracting well over 1000 attendees in each of the past few years. Instead of just lectures, there is now a broad range of hands-on workshops, poster papers, and other innovative means of communication. The chemical education programs at ACS national and regional meetings are much larger and better attended than they were at my first ACS meeting. Many presentations report chemical education research findings that are valuable guides for helping my students learn. There are more companies exhibiting materials that I can use in my teaching, and cultural, age, and gender diversity is greater. I rejoice in the much larger number of students attending national meetings, and I am told that at session breaks there now are lines in both rest rooms.

In the year 2000, two-year colleges will educate a much larger number of students and a greater fraction of all students than in 1960. Public community colleges did not exist until 1901, so they are a phenomenon of the 20th century - a most welcome one, given the many students they serve who otherwise might not have an opportunity to pursue careers that require knowledge of chemistry. Two-year college teachers now organize programs for national meetings, serve as officers of the ACS Division of Chemical Education, and are a much stronger influence on chemical education - real progress.

There are more and better interactions among high school and college teachers of chemistry. In 1970 both this Journal and the Division of Chemical Education were almost entirely dedicated to college-level teachers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s both the Division and the Journal began to encourage much broader representation. This has been extremely productive, as attested by high school days at ACS national meetings and the many articles in each issue of this Journal that are pointed out in the "Especially for High School Teachers" column written by the Secondary School Chemistry editor.

New developments in technology have affected both teaching and research. The first demonstration of a working laser was in 1960, and at about the same time the transistor, invented in 1947, was beginning to supplant the vacuum tube in electronic circuits. This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry is for the use of lasers to determine, on a femtosecond time scale, what happens as a chemical reaction takes place. Our March 1998 cover and Viewpoints article point out that more electronic components can now be put onto an 8-in. silicon wafer than the number of people on this planet, population bomb or not. There is a lot more for students to learn, and communications technology affords us much wider scope for how they learn it. Most computers in 1965 could communicate only through decks of punched cards and printers that were ignorant of lower-case letters. We have progressed through time-shared mainframes, mini- and microcomputers, and networked desktop computers to the Internet. Journal papers now report courses taken by students on different campuses who communicate via the Internet, and the Computer Committee of the Division of Chemical Education holds several online conferences every year. The Journal, plus lots more, is now available via JCE Online to all subscribers, provided their computers have access to the Web.

As 1999 comes to a close, the pace of change has accelerated to frantic, but chemical education is successfully riding the crest of the wave of progress. Our success can be attributed to hard work and dedication on the part of a vast number of people at all levels of the educational system. Let us resolve to continue that effort in support of even more and better change in the new millennium.