ABSTRACT
The developing technologies and skills that enabled us to build civilization have also enabled us to keep the endless struggle between creative and destructive uses of those technologies and skills in a kind of balance. Signs of the tipping are omnipresent now, and two measures are unmistakable. First has been the massive build-up of the "military-industrial complex". Second, has been the equally heavy build-up of multinational corporations whose industrial waste is polluting our land, fresh water, air, and oceans—and driving our fellow species to extinction—with virtual impunity. There's a third destructive vector that may be the one that finally tips the balance: the unseen, cumulative impacts of hundreds of everyday technologies we use for our convenience, entertainment, and comfort that are in many ways making us too distracted, inattentive, oblivious, sedated, and weak. As humans, we have enormous natural strengths—the products of a hundred thousand generations of evolution.
