The planetary emergency unfolding around us is, first and foremost...a crisis of thought, values, perceptions, ideas and judgments. In other words, it is a crisis of mind, which makes it a crisis of those institutions which purport to improve minds.

No institutions in modern society are better equipped to catalyze the necessary transition to a sustainable world than colleges and universities. They have access to the leaders of tomorrow and the leaders of today. What they do matters to the wider public.

In an ecological perspective, in other words, there are few accidents or anomalies, only outcomes based on system structure and dynamics. Climate change and glittering malls, Calcuttan poverty and sybaritic wealth, biotic impoverishment and economic growth, militarism and terrorism, global domination and utter vulnerability are not different things but manifestations of a single system.

It is not education, but education of a certain kind, that will serve us. And the current model of western, urban-centered, school-based, education, which is so often more focused on turning children into efficient corporate units rather than curious and open-minded adults, will only lead us further down the wrong path.

Real security, in other words, is inseparable from issues of energy policy; education; public health; preservation of soils, forests, and waters; and broadly based, sustainable prosperity.

The planetary emergency unfolding around us is, first and foremost...a crisis of thought, values, perceptions, ideas and judgments. In other words, it is a crisis of mind, which makes it a crisis of those institutions which purport to improve minds.

"Our experience of the world is being impoverished to the extent that it is being rendered artificial and prepackaged."