Ticking Time Bomb of Extinction." That in a nutshell is what I was thinking when I realized that I was standing at the precipice of the second mass extinction in the history of life on Earth. It is, as I have stated above, not a theoretical proposition that we will annihilate ourselves (along with much of the rest of the biological community), but a reality. And even worse, the reality is not that some distant time in the future. The reality is here, right now, as we speak. It will certainly take more than a century for us to annihilate ourselves and/or our civilization, but we have already annihilated dozens of species in the history of our biological existence. Our fossil record shows a record of extinctions from the very beginning, and we are not likely to forget, nor will we be capable of stopping it in the near future. By my calculations, if the current course is not altered within the next decade, we will find ourselves dealing with a massive die-off of species within the next few years. In this case, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that the human species will also be annihilated. Even more so than other forms of life, our species has evolved with an over-developed, over-protective intelligence that will prevent us from making fundamental change. With these qualities in mind, it's going to take an effort of monumental proportions and an understanding that we're all about to die if we're to avoid the greatest disaster in the history of life on Earth. It won't be easy, but I hope that by detailing what I have learned I can help you avoid being one of the billions who will suffer the consequences of our self-inflicted end. I have divided this text into four main sections: • Part One: What's Wrong • Part Two: Rebuilding Civilization • Part Three: Climate Change • Part Four: What Will Happen Next We'll start by looking at what's wrong with us and our society. * * * The Problem A while back I decided to watch a documentary about the Great Depression. I had already seen some of the movies showing what happened to people, but I wanted to know more, so I could more fully appreciate what this great man had accomplished and how we, as a species, could do better. If you haven't seen it, the movie is called _The Greatest_ _Generation._ It's the story of a country that fell into the abyss after nearly thirty years of prosperity following the Great War. For me, the film's most revealing moment came near the end. There's a scene when the filmmaker is telling his film about the 1930s in a Hollywood studio. The room is filled with old film reels, old cameras, stacks of old magazines, and posters of old Hollywood films. In the background is a large sign hanging on the wall that reads: The Greatest Generation. The filmmaker asks one of his assistants to show him a small frame with a few lines of film on it. The assistant says, "We lost that film. It never made it to the editing room because a few of the men who made it were already dead." As I watched this scene, I remembered a similar quote by W. H. Auden: "We must love one another or die."1 When I saw this movie, a line from _The Great Gatsby_ popped into my head: "It is only that mankind has never before been through an age like this. The world has been battered out of shape by a succession of imponderable forces—fear, greed, honor, and the profit motive."2 The Great Depression had "battered out" our world—so much so that even now some people think it's just a movie—but, unfortunately, our world is still being battered out of shape. To put it simply, we've got a major problem and we're the cause of the problem. The problem is this: we are, by and large, the bad guys and if we don't change our behavior there won't be much left. So what do we do about this? What's Wrong with Us It's no secret that modern civilization is facing several difficulties: population growth; energy consumption; urban sprawl; and so on. The last thing we want is to become the victims of a Hollywood-style apocalypse, where society is destroyed by a nuclear attack or some other catastrophe, with tens of thousands of people reduced to nothing more than bodies—skeletal, dehydrated, and starving. Fortunately, there are ways to avoid such a disaster. One of them is to change our behavior. You'll notice that as I write I do not capitalize the words _human_ or _citizen._ That's because they are not proper nouns. You and I, however, are proper nouns, as are our elected representatives. Some of you may have picked up on my attitude and may think, _Well, that's good, but what can I do?_ The challenge is for you to imagine what it would be like for you and me to live with the awareness that it's possible we'll be annihilated. You can't possibly imagine it. I certainly can't either. It's possible some of you think you can imagine it, but can't actually grasp the details of what I'm telling you. You may be fooling yourself. Others of you may have picked up on my attitude and may think, _Well, that's great. Here's how I can change my behavior._ It's likely that some of you already have changed your behavior. What you may be thinking now is, "Well, in that case, what do we do now?" And the answer is: we continue to change our behavior. We keep making changes that lead to changes in behavior and, in turn, we keep learning. This requires an awareness of how our behavior is related to the overall system, and how our actions impact on it, all the while taking action. And one more thing that you may have picked up on my attitude and think, _You're crazy. You've got to be joking. You don't mean that._ Well, yes, I do. Or maybe it's not exactly how you say it. Maybe I'm saying we've got to learn to become wise to ourselves and our world. That, I believe, is a lot like what it means to be wise. What's even more amazing is that it can happen—and has already happened. When you study history, it becomes evident that humanity has progressed in fits and starts, but when you look at the past couple of centuries, we have been accelerating. Even if we assume a growth in technology with no change in population, it would be reasonable to predict that over the next fifty years we would increase our productive capacity by orders of magnitude. Of course, you know that's not going to happen, so your concern may have been that I'm saying we'll destroy ourselves in a relatively short time span. This is not going to happen either. In fact, I'm convinced we have much farther to go before we encounter the problems that the great Maya predicted in their calendar. The Mayan people were one of the most advanced civilizations of their time. Their written language was a combination of pictographs and syllables—like Chinese—and was used for business, administration, and war. It was also used to store, retrieve, and encode information, which gave them a profound understanding of natural phenomena. Their calendars, for example, told them that after a few decades, humans would begin to annihilate themselves. For several reasons, many historians consider the so-called Maya "apocalypse" to be not so much an event that destroys life, but a period in time when they would disappear from the earth.3 Most folks, though, believe in the idea of apocalypse—they're willing to buy the paperback book, or the ticket to see the movie, or join a tour to go see it firsthand. After all, it has been an age-old fascination with our human nature to fear it could all come crashing down at any moment. Many of us can only imagine such a world, a world filled with chaos and suffering. It is for this reason I'm going to make it very simple and say we will be annihilated when our behavior changes—a change to our behavior that's so drastic it can no longer be dismissed as a short-term aberration. I'll also say it will be no ordinary change, but a change from what we are doing now. We will have to change what we are doing today because we've failed to take steps to change our behaviors. Most of us are not willing to make changes in our behavior because we are more interested in maintaining the status quo. It's what we're used to. It's safer. You can find examples of people refusing to change or making no real changes in virtually every sphere of human activity. This doesn't mean we are doomed, just that we are in the same boat and headed toward the rocks. If this change is to occur, it has to start with each of us. The Challenge It may seem as if I'm speaking in doom and gloom. That may be right, but then again it may be wrong. In fact, in one of my lectures to some students at university, I told them that we have been faced with apocalyptic scenarios at least three times in the past. The first was some time around A.D. 1066, when nearly all the civilizations in Europe were wiped out in a small-scale holocaust called the Black Death. As many