The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.

The world is not in any sense in danger from itself. The world is in fact not in any danger at all. It is we who are in danger.

In effect, you're saying that if you knew how you oughtt to live, then the flaw is man could be controlled. If you knew how you ought to live, you wouldn't be forever screwing up the world. perhaps in fact the two things are actually one thing. Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn't know how he ought to live.

If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.

The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't—and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren't, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn't just found here and there among human cultures, it's found universally.

And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world, or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.

Indigenous people believe that Man belongs to the World; civilized people believe that the World belongs to Man.