LONDON -- I am writing this in a cybercafe in one of the world’s oldest cities. Not far from the site of my Internet connection, a ragged spit of Roman wall has been uncovered. Being here causes me to reflect on the passage of time.

Because we are stuck in our own moment, we tend to think that everything hat is has always been and always will be. But of course, that isn’t true. When I was a college student spending a semester in London in 1972, London was a soot-stained city, and had been for 150 years.

Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the great government buildings of Whitehall – all were black. All because London was a city whose power (light and heat) came from coal.

Coal is no longer king here. And London has had a bath. Sure there’s litter, and the carbon monoxide level from all the cars can cause a walker’s nose to burn. But the buildings have been scrubbed to their original gray and white.

It is now against the law to burn coal.

In the United States, few people heat their homes with coal, but it is still used widely to produce electricity. According to the industry, coal is essential for that reason. But the ways of the past and present are not the ways of the future. And the future will be upon us more quickly than we expect.

Those of us who are old enough recall a time when no one had personal computers or dreamed of having them. It wasn’t so long ago – the early 1980s. Now here we are – the Internet, cybercafes.

According to a recent a wire story in The Charleston Gazette, the utility revolution will be upon us just as quickly. It has already commenced and will be over in 20 years. One after another, buildings across the country are removing themselves from power company grids and producing their own electricity.

How are they doing this? With turbines, solar panels and a half dozen other new technologies. In the New York City borough of Queens, a police precinct building is power- independent. California is a leader in buildings that produce their own electricity.

Why not West Virginia? We have a unique opportunity not only to redirect our economy from the industry that has so exploited us, but to point the way for the rest of the nation in converting to in-house power production.

Here in Britain, the coal industry, once the backbone of the nation, is dead. It is a picture of West Virginia’s future. Wales, formerly a world center of coal production, has only one working mine. But after some difficult years of transition, the economy of Wales has turned a corner, and new, diverse industries are taking the place of mining.

The West Virginia of 1999, through circumstances beyond our control, will not be the West Virginia of 2009 or 2019. What the future will look like depends on our ability to be creative and forward-thinking.

We can continue to follow the rest of the nation. Or we can choose to lead it.