Contextual shift
The 20th century political battle between the Left – collectivism and socialism – and the Right – individualism and capitalism – is being eclipsed by a larger question of awareness and responsibility. Political and news agendas tend to reinforce materialistic, competitive, male-prevalent, urban-industrial and inherently unsustainable values – whether inclined leftwards or rightwards. Both Right and Left have chased the ubiquitous goal of 'progress', and both are thus equally part of the problem, not necessarily part of the solution.

As a result, democratic countries are nowadays faced with but marginal choices between different kinds of centrist political economism subscribing to uniform principles: economic growth, consumerism, voter appeasement and 'business as usual'. This has the effect of giving leeway to extremist minority agendas which can skew issues off-target into diversionary issues. However, 'business as usual' is a crucial mind-set: any advocacy of change is seen as a costly disruption and loss for vested interests, often presented as 'the public interest'. Advocating change not only loses votes and upsets markets – it is often portrayed as a threat to the very basis of civilisation as we now have it. This puts reformers and terrorists falsely in the same bracket. Meanwhile technological, populist and consumerist changes – gizmos, styles and shopping malls – are presented as expressions of change, when in fact they simply extrapolate and continue the existing scheme of things. This delays and marginalises all motions toward fundamental systemic world change, while democracy gives electorates a false feeling that people have a say in the future of their nations. Above all, business as usual.

However, something else is also going on. An undefined alternative movement exists, characteristically non-organised, yet close to the ground and to the real concerns of ordinary people. This movement has many aspects to it, generally aligned more to lifestyle and consciousness than to ideology or rigid belief. Many people belong to this movement without knowing they do. Membership is defined by the ideas and behaviour one personally lives by.

At root, the core belief is in psycho-spiritual growth and forms of world change which are neither specifically political nor religious – this differs from previous major radical movements. This alternative movement has coalesced around a 'rainbow spectrum' of interests: human, women's, gay, ethnic, children's and minority rights, holistic healing, organic land-use and reafforestation, natural birth and conscious dying, new education, psychotherapy, pacifism, new forms of music and arts, interest in ethnic and ancient cultures, in alternative spiritual paths and magical practices, involvement with extraterrestrial, psychic and paranormal research, small-scale economics, qualities over quantities and many other aspects – some exceptionally sane and others distinctly eccentric.

These are all facets of an emergent diamond, the sumtotal of which is clearly seen by only a few. Yet this diamond constitutes a wholeness which provides a B substitute picture for the future. Its strength is shown by the extent to which authorities and media display a need to contain, downplay or destroy it. An example was the ongoing furore over the relationship problems of Charles and Diana, 'the Waleses': their thoroughly modern and normal difficulties were publicly trained into a backward-facing expression of outrage over the breaking of tradition and 'proper' behaviour, in order to obfuscate the paradigmatic issues they presented to the public domain.

Another example is the apparently avid adoption of 'green' and non-sexist values by corporations and institutions which are in fact doing the minimum necessary to make it look as if they are changing their ways – when in fact their ways are changing only when public pressures oblige such changes. Meanwhile, prominent individuals are rubbished when they propound progressive ideas, which are suitably debunked by an apparently-overwhelming rational logic. Media coverage of progressive changes are blocked, twisted or diluted, cults are pressured, psycho-active drugs are criminalised, community experiments and adventurous projects are restricted by financial limitations and regulations, and old, backward-facing social agendas are plugged relentlessly. Arguments over divorce laws studiously avoid re-examining marriage and its vows, and arguments over abortion avoid examination of the real issues around natural contraception and real social-psychological issues.

While this movement is neither centrally organised, nor directly politically influential, it penetrates the homes, bedrooms and personal lives of all strata of society, acting as an opinion-shaping force and a nexus of cultural revival – particularly through women. Women constitute some 60-70% of this movement and its energy: their increasing involvement in public affairs and their roles in the lives of influential men play probably the key role in transforming the world. However, it is a people's movement, and any tendencies toward separatism tend to represent stages of approach toward unitive action.

The strength of this movement is manifold. It is near-impossible to successfully suppress – it grows like weeds in a sidewalk. It derives its strength from experienced realities rather than from stated ideologies. It counts amongst its members many intelligent and well-placed people. It draws in younger generations – emergent power-holders. It addresses human nature itself, gradually evolving prototypes for future times. It propagates itself not through conversion and persuasion but through individual illumination precipitated by personal crises and dilemmas. It arises from a perennial human capacity for awareness, which has stored up a tide of pent-up kinetic energy. It addresses every issue in the world that there is to address, where and when it is needed.

It has not achieved majority nor even large-scale minority impetus, yet its influence is larger and more pervasive than its avowed subscribers represent. Historically, it has many similarities to other nascent movements, such as Christianity in the two centuries following Jesus the Nazarene's mission, or the early pre-Renaissance enlightenment movements, or the early religious nonconformist movements such as those of Wyclif and Hus[9] in the late Middle Ages. These were movements with an element of historical inevitability to them, since they embodied a deeply common though long-repressed need.

Although this movement does not set out to be politically active or subversive, by nature it is so. Its longterm effect is to swing the gravitational centre of human thinking and activity away from established channels. It operates within the context of the modern system – it is born of photocopiers, telephones, jumbo-jets and cars – yet it is not of it and points beyond it. It infiltrates the lives of people through the agency of their own experience – health problems, relationship and family breakdown, sudden loss or intense personal predicament. The consequent inner growth arising from such life-crunches enlarges the spectrum of solutions available. The very means of resolving problems itself changes. The whole context changes.

The small numbers of pioneers in this movement, acting ahead of time, clear a way for the future. The time of preparation seems long and arduous for veterans who started in the 1960s-70s, yet historically the movement is progressing fast. Its starting-point arose amongst the Beatniks and Hippies and other eccentrics of the 1950s and 1960s. While this movement was catalysed and fuelled largely by use of psychoactive drugs, it was not caused by them nor was it dependent on them. Once impetus had grown in localised centres such as San Francisco, New York, London-Liverpool, Ibiza, Goa and Sydney, it pulled out the plugs for many other related areas of activity, including meditation, lifestyles, healing, music and design, black power, feminism, new business practices, agriculture and alternative political agendas.

These broad areas of breakthrough have immense and detailed implications. Events of the early 21st century are likely to be increasingly preoccupied with them: situations in which crises hit us, new connections and configurations are established, changes are made by pragmatic necessity, positive precedents are set and crucial issues are resolved in fundamentally new ways – under the threat of dire consequences in the event of failure. World transformation and confronting world disaster is, in such a context, not one specific event or action, more an intense historical period and process. This might already have started around 1988-89, on an unconscious level – a reality-shift at that time revealed many new possibilities and began changing the very nature of time and the world situation, regardless of 'business as usual' and the attempted jump-starting of new upswings in economic growth.

Rather than constituting one big crisis, mass awakening could take the shape of a stream of crises covering, one by one or in bundles, all of the salient issues we must face. Crises which force humanity to address a full field of issues and up-coming dilemmas, like an historical obstacle course set by mysterious powers. Many of these issues might be localised, reaching everyone else through media-coverage, emotional impact and secondary consequences. A growing sense of connectedness and identification between different peoples causes localised eruptions of disorder and public pain to be felt by people worldwide.

As general physical ill-health can concentrate in specific weakened areas of the body, so too, amongst humanity, local trouble-spots can attract, focus and draw on collective unconscious ill-feelings and the shadow aspect of humanity as a whole. There is a cruel irony here, inasmuch as people in intense trouble-spots also experience great wonders which can arise out of instability and danger – outbreaks of sharing, human warmth and compassion which counterbalance suffering and hardship. During the Bosnian war, Sarajevo was a place of concentration not only of suffering but also of spiritual beneficence, as ordinary people supported each other through shared hardships. People in comfortable, routinised, insulated environments miss these. Safe, insured lifestyles do have a way of suppressing the life-force of people and blocking opportunities which are available. However, insecurity and suffering are poor substitutes for the need for social transformation.

Are people actually learning from modern events and horrors? As holistic reasoning will have it, events take place because they are somehow needed for our inner education. They draw our attention to things we're omitting to look at. They demand resolution not only of immediate issues but also of their historical roots and thematically-connected issues. As soon as such origins and issues are recognised, the healing process is already on its way.

Education
To educate, or educe, means 'to bring out or develop from latent or potential existence', to elicit principles from experience – to get the message from what life is teaching us. This happens collectively as well as individually, and history and current events are thus there to be learnt from. The key issue is to learn from events, such that the events which cause us pain or difficulty may be changed, and those which bring us enrichment or fulfilment may be enhanced. In other words, wars will continue until we learn to stop creating them, until we finally grow tired. The pattern of large-scale war acted out in recent centuries might now have been rendered obsolete by dint of our global learning – though there is still risk of reverting to large-scale war since we have not yet fully acknowledged that we have learnt this lesson.

The playing out of mutually-assured destruction scenarios during the Cold War period, simulated on computer rather than in the battlefield, has helped – by analysing warfare to such a degree, we have become aware of the costs. In wars such as the Falklands war of 1982, grown-up British soldiers found themselves getting emotionally upset over the death and suffering of 'the enemy', 'the Argies'. Yet, today, the bloody enactment of small-scale and civil wars, of lethal disturbances and terrorism still thrives. People wring their hands and rue the violence ordinary folk wreak upon one another, yet we still await a shift of consensus which disallows such wars and brings large-scale disarmament and psychological change. Will the war equation, as but one of many ills of the past, be carried over into the next millennium? Who chooses?

Seen in the light of historical process, we might well go through momentous waves of crisis in the 21st century. Issues are likely to be presented in surges, shocking us deeply enough to provoke corrective action, giving only just enough time to digest things before the next surge. Such surges are needed because they stretch us beyond our habituated comfort-zones, causing us to discover and change to a higher gear. They force us up against the wall. Yet times of relative calm are necessary too, to allow assimilation and to regenerate the underlying wish for change. It is as if current world history constitutes a crash-course in identifying key issues we must get to grips with, before it is too late. Yet humanity has genuine security needs: we need a few knowns to live by, children still need to get born and cows still need to be milked. From a mass-educational viewpoint, we need a measure of normality in order to preserve human sensibilities, yet we need sufficient crises to oblige us to change. It is as if the collective unconscious of humanity is bringing its death-wishes to the surface, in order to force a fundamental decision: death or life? It is as if we are saying to the collective unconscious, or to 'higher powers', "please force us to stop, because we cannot stop ourselves".

There is also the question of conservatism and resistance to change, which can delay and temporarily stop positive steps. Conservatism has two aspects: natural adherence to tradition and regularity, and outright opposition to change – the former is a stabilising influence arising from human sensibility, while the latter is a blocking influence arising from matters of control and power. If change is excessively thrust upon ordinary people, they resist changes and crave stability.

In 1950s-60s Maoist China, industrialisation, collectivisation and cultural revolution created at least as many problems as they did solutions – some benefited and some lost out, while most people lost their roots. The relentless force with which these reforms were applied led to a period of exceptional materialism in the 1980s-90s, which nevertheless brought with it many changes favouring some and harming others. This led to a political battle in 1989 between traditional party hierarchies and their lackeys and a generation of young individualistic, modernised go-getters, reaching its symbolic climax in Tienanmen Square. In this case, political resistance to the sweeping changes of the 1960s became a force for change in the 1990s, while the paternalistic revolutionary fathers driving the collectivist changes of the 1960s became avowed political conservatives after 1989. Conservatism and radicalism can change sides over time yet, as forces within the collective unconscious, their interplay stretches over the generations.

During the 20th century, political visions have gradually given way to economic systems as the nexus of change. While political systems have, despite many changes, retained certain patterns, techno-economic change has romped forward, especially since the 1960s. In countries where such changes have prevailed in recent decades, political conservatism has become an ever-Ber defining force: faced with networked telecommunications, multinational conglomerates and air travel, electorates have sided for but small political changes. Maintenance of the power of vested interests and the status quo is very much the dominant pattern of the late 20th century – betraying an unconscious anticipation of changes to come.

Yet keeping a lid on fundamental change has brewed an underlying imperative for change from root to branch, a grass-roots, apolitical need which grows marginally Ber and faster than the capacity to suppress, divert or contain such forces. Increasingly sophisticated social control, bureaucratisation, consumer temptations and data-processing has led to escalating cost, complexity, superficiality and capacity for blunder. Subtly increasing worldwide public skepticism over politicians, products, science, medicine, law and secrecy, and increasing fatigue with media bombardment and senseless organisational changes pervades many countries – impetus to maintain the world system as it now stands derives mainly from countries hitherto deprived of modern material benefits – such as China.

However, even in the Asian Tiger economies, currently enjoying mushrooming prosperity and modernity, belief in promised incentives and acquisitions is not as B as it could be. Materialism, in the minds of millions, is becoming a means to an end rather than an end in itself. However, a question now arises as to what our ends and goals might be. The world's population is increasingly jaded with official culture and thousands of things – especially many are put out of a job (and thus a place in society) by robotisation. Consumer satiation accelerates, and diminishing returns arise from each new development – people's first family car means much more to them than their third. With this comes a quiet, creeping apathy or antipathy, manifesting nowadays as an indistinct disappointment in society and its structures, edging slowly toward endemic resistance and vocal protest using new tactics. This unconscious tide at present rears up in heated outbreaks of public concern over beef supplies, education and health, the credibility of traditional authority-figures or other issues, which act as a focus for vague yet charged frustrations lurking in the public domain. Thus, on top, conservative forces dominate, while underneath a para-political tidal wave slowly builds up toward breaking-point.

While stability and conformity have been Bly encouraged – even enforced – during the Reagan/Thatcher-inspired 1980s and 1990s, something has been surreptitiously shifting underneath. The world is experiencing crisis-multiplication. This arises not only from instant global media coverage or rising social awareness – it is hitting even the most sheltered enclaves of humanity. The Kogi Indians of Colombia have been but one lucid voice from the jungles, warning of things to come: "But now they are killing the Mother. The Younger Brother, all he thinks about is plunder. The Mother looks after him too, but he does not think. He is cutting into her flesh. He is cutting into her arms. He is cutting off her breasts. He takes out her heart. He is killing the heart of the world."[10] Crises are breaking out in places and sectors people have never heard of before, in increasingly unpredictable and worrying ways. These are unlikely to diminish, since we are experiencing unavoidable, inevitable repercussions of past human activities – reverberations which cannot now be stopped.

Stopping production of CFCs does not instantaneously cause the ozone layer to revive – vast quantities of CFCs already float around and leak continuously from equipment in use, obsolete or scrapped. Thus atmospheric ozone holes will not be repaired for decades, even if tough worldwide legislation were enacted tomorrow. Reverberations from past acts can continue some time after the issue has turned around in social and legislative spheres. Being interrelated, single factors can replicate and repercuss down the line in ways which now mean that no return to previous natural and historic balances is possible. During the coming century a new balance needs to be sought, found and established. Humanity is responsible for finding that new balance.

Industrial demand for timber causes serious deforestation of such places as the Himalayan slopes of India and Nepal, which leads to irregular rainy seasons in the subcontinent and increased flooding in the Ganges plain. This leads to social disruption in north India and Bangladesh, bringing personal loss, community splintering and social restiveness. It leads to such seemingly unrelated phenomena as the awakening of Bangladeshi women to their needs and rights, which leads to ructions and insecurities amongst male Islamic conservatives – not only in Bangladesh. This fuels a tide of Islamic popular opinion worldwide, igniting fundamentalist protest elsewhere against any encroaching, insidious modern influence seen to be at work, sparking social divisions between modernists and conservatives from Morocco to Egypt to Iran to Palestine to Indonesia – even the Million-Man March of American blacks in USA in 1995 was Islamic inspired.

Thus Washington and Paris are also affected, through protests, pressures and bomb-threats, affecting confidence in international money-markets. Such uncertainties can lead to the stockpiling of agricultural and pharmaceutical chemicals, hedging against future shortage, which itself leads to subsequent over-use of chemicals, leading to potential large-scale outbreaks of certain kinds of ailments 20-30 years later. Over-use of antibiotics and pesticides leads to diminishing immunity levels in wide swathes of population, giving indirect rise to outbreaks of infections such as Ebola, AIDS, asthma and even possibly BSE-related diseases in disparate parts of the world... and so on go the cycles of repercussions in a frighteningly multiplying manner! The logging activities of Japanese timber companies in Sikkim can affect hospital wards in Pennsylvania and truck drivers' wives in Peru. This global interdependence has grown enormously, leading toward ominous possibilities for the future.

Making changes
The question which then arises is where to start? Everything seems so complex and interrelated! It is certainly possible to legislate and plan action-programmes on identifiable issues – such as to engage in reafforestation of Himalayan slopes – but much more is necessary. An additional problem arises too: once we acknowledge one problem, we have to acknowledge others too, and we stand the risk of being overwhelmed with more problems than we can handle. Here we come to the value and usefulness of crises and of appropriate responses to them. When humanity makes it a habit not to correct errors at an early stage and not to learn from experience, crises become necessary! It does not have to be this way. This is the way we have made it. To render crises less necessary, collective action and learning are crucial. Otherwise crises become disasters.

The benefit of a crisis is that it focuses minds. It moves hearts, reveals issues, precipitates soul-searching and provokes definitive action. It gives concrete, immediate, urgent challenges to surmount – with a motivating measure of threat to back it up. It presents us with hard facts. The disadvantage with crises is that someone usually suffers – though, if used positively, individual sacrifice. though regrettable, can be turned into collective benefit. Martyrs and innocent victims do have ways of turning the hearts of the public – but can our hearts not be turned earlier before harm sets in? While crises charge their price, they also pay dividends. We should also remember the long, slow, grinding suffering inherent in stable, affluent and regularised societies! Stability, comfort and security also levy their charge – if they charged no price, Americans and Europeans of today would be happy and blissed-out, unequivocally living in a heaven on earth.

One further advantage to positively-met crisis is that it tends to lead to resolution of many more than single questions. Crises draw in interrelated issues and variables, causing a conflagration of crunches and revealing a massive concatenation of causes. These themselves then lead to new, irreversible and blatant outcomes, moving everything forward into a wider context. When USSR ended the Cold War and went through its internal changes in 1986-93, geopolitical balances and the map of the whole world changed, all of a sudden, affecting countries not directly involved. Reform in the USSR shifted the whole world context, even though the primary intention was simply to address Russian issues. A can of worms was opened and, a decade later, they're still crawling.

Crises often assist the emergence or resolution of issues which have no obvious link or possible connection with the problem at hand – the large number of orphans in post-Ceaucescu Rumania have helped childless couples in other countries (and vice versa), and the Kobe earthquake in Japan helped solve unemployment problems in California and Scotland. Crises amount to holographic, many-angled, urgent situations where the cards are laid squarely on the table, yet they cannot be put down to single causes or effects even when they are identifiable. They draw attention to the many strings of confluent influences which make up a situation, and they precipitate multi-faceted and wholesale progression in all directions. If, that is, people respond to them openly and honestly. When this is the case, a crisis can become distinctly advantageous, and the price it charges can yield valuable results in the longterm.

During the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1989-92, the 'playing of the nationalist card' by Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia led to a civil war of disastrous proportions, involving atrocities everyone thought were left behind in the 1940s. Had the European Union concertedly leaned on the region and its provocateurs at an early, timely stage (1989-91), without complacency or hypocrisy, then ethnic insecurity might well never have been permitted to boil over into strife and atrocity. Social, ethnic and boundary issues in Yugoslavia could have been resolved otherwise – if Czechia and Slovakia could do it peacefully, why not Yugoslavia? The reasonable, moderate majority in then-Yugoslavia could have prevailed during these trying transitional times if the European powers had slowed and tempered the growing crisis, offering genuine gestures of assurance and incentive at the right moment.

Absence of constructive intervention led to barbarity, schism and devastation beyond contemporary parallel – a deep stain on European integrity which peace doesn't heal. Such conflict soured inter-ethnic relations throughout the world: this was a triumph for narrow-minded, bigoted intolerance and destructivity, a mass psycho-virus possessing much potency today. It was a negative precedent for our times, easy for others to emulate – just when global security has become uppermost. Yugoslavs gave the world a European thumbs-up to civil wars and ethnic disturbances worldwide – atrocity was re-legitimised.

The powers which failed to prevent the disaster demonstrated that the principles of civilised cooperation do not stretch beyond immediate self-interest. Yugoslavia was economically dispensable – neither a rich market nor a strategic oilfield. The impotence or unwillingness of world powers in intervening constructively in early-1990s disorders in such places as Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Somalia, Timor, Tibet, Peru and Afghanistan, and their complicity in arming such disaster-zones, sends a message that the new world order cares only when there is big money involved. Such geopolitical cynicism encourages a world culture of self-interest which is ominous for the future.

Such tragedies can be avoided or reduced if there is but an application of foresight and preventative action, at the right time. Yet tragedies abound, worldwide, both newsworthy and overlooked tragedies. Though Bosnia is a small place, the symbolism of its troubles is large. The precipitous complacency and feigned impotence of those in a position to affect the situation was a classic symptom of our times. This is a symptom of what some would call the 'end times'.

Choice
Since the 1960s we have become clearly aware of the need for deep and thorough change. Everyone knows it – unless they actively bury their heads in the sand. Yet we have not acted with the commitment and fundamentality needed – we have practised denial and avoidance to sophisticated levels. The 1980s characterised a period of extreme escapism – freedom became a marketable commodity with a designer label and a strange indigestion and headache afterwards.

As a result of our enormous 20th century historic omissions, we have renounced critical degrees of capacity for future choice. If choice is declined or avoided when presented, its scope diminishes until the choice is withdrawn and imperatives follow. Meanwhile, we have created new problems which compound and complexify the problems we previously had. We have developed such an addiction to resisting The Big Question that it is difficult now to break the habit – addiction slowly moves from a dulling diversion to a deadly killer, an unstoppable self-destruction urge. We have omitted to take hold of positive opportunities, despite B presentations in 1965-68 and 1987-89: underlying hopes for change were smothered and dashed in a barrage of war, marketing-spin and self-interest, causing many people to give up on change while still secretly wishing for it. We have allowed ourselves to subside into reaffirming our hidden hopelessness and disappointment with life.

Large-scale disaster is a much greater likelihood than most people wish to acknowledge. Serious disaster has struck many people already, in their bodies, homes, workplaces, landscapes and societies – though most prefer not to see things this way. Some come forward with definite-sounding predictions of a future date when disaster is to come – many of which dates have already passed. Edgar Cayce, in 1943, predicted tectonic upheavals by 1976 (though, to be fair, he said '76', which equally could mean 2076, or 76 years from 1943, which is 2019). Astrologers expected tectonic activity in 1989-93 (connected with multiple conjunctions in Capricorn) – though there was indeed great social tectonic shifting around that time. The Mayan Long Count calendar and its modern advocates predict an end of the world as we know it on 23rd December 2012, at the end of a cycle which began in 3114 BCE. However, this could be a reflection of deep Mayan and Aztec beliefs, since both civilisations knew themselves to be failing and were highly preoccupied with their mortality. So afraid were they of downfall that in the early 1500s the Aztecs were sacrificing some 250,000 people per year, to forestall catastrophe[11].

What is fascinating about such predictions as these is that while they not infrequently turn out to be incorrect, they can still have symbolic elements of truth to them – and the apocalyptic interpretations infused into them by modern people can overemphasise or misconstrue what is actually being said. Obsessive haggling over dates and theories can obstruct a clearer and more mature analysis of such predictions. However, above all, proliferating predictions – a new Nostradamus book emerges every two years, because it is good business – are a symptom of the state of the collective unconscious. We sense something is coming. In our mythologies, there are many images of a Great Reckoning, a final whiplash arising from our errors. We have no proof of the validity of a prediction until something happens to prove it – by which time it is too late. The most popular prediction is that nothing at all will happen and life will go on more or less as today – most governments officially work on this assumption, though background departments do research other options – authorities are, in truth, just as superstitious as anyone else. Leaning on predictions, whether psychic, religious or scientific, is an article of faith and a question of interpretation: we can only wait and see what becomes true.

Yet commonsense and simple observation, culled in the streets, fields and climates of every country, is sufficient to tell any sane person that something is afoot and something must be done. Psychic vision or scientific training is not needed – if anything, they can obstruct accurate forecasting. They omit to reckon in the ongoing influence of choices made – whether by humans and our institutions, or whether by higher powers which could, conceivably, be conducting a 'holding operation' to optimise our deeper education and awareness such that we are obliged to make our choices ourselves. They also focus upon some future disaster time while ignoring the unfolding realities of the disaster which visits us now, today, in every part of the world – humanity is lost, Mother Nature is crying out, and the Great Tribulation has been upon us long enough for us to have got used to it!

However disaster, great or small, might manifest, we are nevertheless confronted with sufficient facts to work on, and we face an enormous choice, now. This is not an extremist statement: it's simple commonsense. We know approximately what is necessary. We know what many of the issues are. Yet the will to carry out appropriate redemptive actions is strangely, painfully absent, except amongst a minority – some of whom are paralysed by fear, by exaggerated doomsterism or by a transfer of power to divine or malign forces beyond our grasp. UN conferences have been left to sort it out, as if diplomatic ventilation and a few dollars might make them disappear. A dangerous impasse pervades humanity, a dangerous pretence. And, with it, a deep perplexity over where on Earth to start unravelling such an almighty tangle.

We live today in a global laboratory experiment to find out what the outcomes truly are from our past historical choices. We live in an enormous experiment to find out how we might react. No one truly knows the outcome, even though predictions are regularly attempted. Disaster or not, we stand on the edge of an enormous abyss.