Excerpt #1 from my book, Interconnected, Interrelated & Interdependent, Like It or Not:
About 10,000 years ago, the ice sheets and tundra vegetation in the north gave way rapidly to coniferous and hardwood forests.
In some areas this led to the beginning of farming and the domestication of plants and animals.
Food-producing societies distinguished themselves from hunter-gatherer societies by their emphasis on property.
By passing their wealth of land and herds to their heirs, a class of hereditary notables was created, and the stratification of society began.
This is the society, a long time in the making, into which we were born, and in which to this day we suffer the legacy of that stratification which mentally permeates our civilization.
While our planet continues to orbit a star we call the sun at 65,000 miles per hour, and orbits—with the rest of our solar system—the Milky Way galaxy at 600,000 miles an hour, one of trillions of galaxies in a universe expanding faster than a billion miles per hour, there exists today the chilling question of how much longer our species will continue to be a part of this evolutionary spectacle.
For, by our behavior on multiple fronts, we have placed our continued existence in jeopardy.
We have created a destructive and unsustainable momentum that must be arrested and reversed if we are to sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.
If we are to advance in our evolutionary track, if we are to continue as a part of an incomprehensively larger interlocking whole, of which our planet does not qualify even as a speck on the blueprint of existence, we need to quickly alter our course.
This is a task that only we — humanity — can accomplish, for it is we, wittingly and unwittingly, who have been and continue to be the villains.
Many have the knowledge and will to correct our course, but there are as many individuals, and private and public organizations and institutions, largely responsible for and vested in our troubled status quo — and aggressively in denial of the urgent need for us to change our ways — who remain huge impediments to change.