Looking at the trends in global warming, environmental deterioration, overpopulation, nuclear proliferation, etc. etc. etc. (pick your poison), it seems pretty clear that we could move right along, in a pro-growth, technologically efficient, business-as-usual manner, to the complete extinction of life on Earth.

We may have painted ourselves into a tragic corner, where any good news about the global economy or political system is actually bad news for our long-term survival.

The question gets to be, how late in the game could we power down the Machine and still preserve the Earth, at some diminished level, as humanity's home? And if a spanner were to get tossed in the works a decade or three earlier than the latest possible date, might that not enable many more people to survive the Apocalypse, because the environment would be that much more livable and our resources less exhausted?

That's a question so big that it's nearly impossible to have a fully informed opinion about it. Neither you nor I have to answer it, yet somehow humanity as a whole must answer it (with whatever help we can get from "above").

We can certainly say this, though: if it's a choice between Apocalypse now, with just a fraction of the population making it through, and the total annihilation of humanity in 20 or 50 or 100 years, we must opt for the former.

But is that the choice? Nothing is certain, yet.

Sure, a grand technological fix might yet emerge: overnight, inexhaustible bounty for all. Or we might all grow tired of suffering, and peace might break out. I spent several decades feeling positive about such possibilities, even as I watched the gap between the world's haves and have-nots yawn ever wider, and our political and business leaders get ever more deeply mired in their greed, callousness, and willingness to deceive.

I no longer believe that any gradual, business-as-usual scenario can be successful; I just don't think there's enough time or enough love.

We each love many people, and that web of love includes us all; yet we who have so much are not yet really willing to open our hearts and our coffers to those who have so little. Sure, we pony up a bit when there's a famine here or a tsunami there, but we're not about to really unsettle ourselves. And it's not even selfishness so much as provincialism, insularity, inertia, and a lack of awareness as we go about our comfortable lives. We're changing, but I don't see us getting from here to there without getting our collective and individual butts kicked.

Next: Growth, Not Death