The world's environment can no longer handle beef.

If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can pray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn.

A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.

We need a game plan to deploy it very quickly to both move the economy forward and create the new businesses and jobs, and address climate change. It's a pretty big task. Pretty challenging.