ABSTRACT
Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of this time of planetary turmoil, breakdown, potential, despair and hope, is that it confronts us so strongly with profound questions about what we are like, as human beings. Is it “human nature’ to be greedy, and not to change until we are forced to? Are we a technologically brilliant, dominant species who will easily solve our current problems with our rational minds? Or are we, actually, rather a bad lot, and the planet will recover and be better off without us, if we shortly create our own demise? These are very common first-off responses, ones I have heard many times as people are confronted with some piece of challenging information about our environmental situation. What they have in common, I feel, is precisely that immediate beginning to face up to ourselves just a bit as a species.
