Before a new world economy can take hold, the old form of economy must relinquish its hold on the minds of the people who control it. The Industrial Age is essentially over. We cannot continue to make more stuff just so people can buy more stuff. We must also find new ways to work together as a species to save our world ecology and to restore what has been lost. If we don’t do that, our world will die, and then we all die with it.

Humankind has been preying on all the other species that share our planet for the entire historic life of our species. We’re a predatory bunch of war-mongering apes, and we get our greatest thrill from destroying others of our species — but we have no fear of destroying any other species we find on the planet’s surface.

We’ve made a huge hullabaloo about how intelligent we are — but we’ve used our intelligence to destroy our world and each other. This may be the flaw in the rise of consciousness among the animal kingdom. Maybe the world would do better if human consciousness faded away, and what is left is more like that of all the other species.

Hard to say how this will play out, but I’m not convinced that human consciousness has made us the “pinnacle of creation”…. rather, I think we have become the scourge of our world’s creation. The real challenge, I think, is to see if we can rise above our current obsession with predatory dominance to a new level of creative mutual support of not just our own species, but all the living species on our world that can be saved.

It may be that all sentient life has a finite historical timeline during which it can evolve to become something better and affirming of the Greater Life… and if it cannot evolve to that transformative level, then the species fails and withers…as all living things do.