ABSTRACT
For the first 99.6 percent of the time humans have walked the earth, the "environment" has been the physical and biological world they evolved in. For these more than two thousand millennia, successive species of humans were intimately attuned to their surroundings. They had extensive knowledge of their climate, seasons, growth cycles of hundreds of plants and animals, and interdependencies that enabled robust members of most living species, including themselves, to survive. Every boy who survived to father a child, or woman who survived to raise one, had to be highly alert. The first of three successive great waves of technology-enabled disconnection between us and our world—waves of disconnection not unlike what happens if a garden is abandoned to drought. The second and third waves occurred, respectively, in the most recent half-century and quarter-century or so.
