Imagine a survivor of a failed civilization with only a tattered book on aromatherapy for guidance in arresting a cholera epidemic. Yet, such a book would more likely be found amid the debris than a comprehensible medical text.

Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.

The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.

Those of us who consider ourselves to be somehow involved in the birthing of a new age, should discover Gaia as well. The idea of Gaia may facilitate the task of converting destructive human activities to constructive and cooperative behavior. It is an idea which deeply startles us, and in the process, may help us as a species to make the necessary jump to planetary awareness.

All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.

A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.

Only rarely do we see beyond the needs of humanity, and he linked this blindness to our Christian and humanist infrastructure. It arose 2,000 years ago and was then benign, and we were no significant threat to Gaia. Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth.