The above quotation from Jared Diamond is one of literally hundreds from prominent individuals who began writing in the wake of Rachel Carson’s powerful book, Silent Spring, published in 1962. Hers was a book that started the environmentalist movement.

At that time I was living in Johannesburg, South Africa surrounded by Cyanide laden mini mountains deposited there from the gold mines. (Since being reduced as the price of gold has gone up thereby making it profitable to process the dumps) Ecological thoughts were farthest from my mind. Nor were these thoughts on my mind later on during my many years of travel throughout the world. International economics and geo political risk evaluation were my thing.

It was not until years later that I began to become aware of a different kind of risk building up in our world centered on the survival of our species on this planet. This was the result of the scientific community releasing a steady flow of peer reviewed studies indicating the onset of a very large number of dangerous ecological "tipping" points, many eclipsing in severity those discussed by Carson in her book. Now, I was looking at global "risk" far beyond my imagination.

In the early years there seemed to be a sense of optimism about the whole thing. Eat less meat, burn less gas, stop polluting the rivers. That was the environmentalist cry. Then, in recent years I noticed a sense of panic beginning to set in. Among not only the scientists themselves, but also among many others in the world community a general feeling of pessimism was beginning to form. We were missing the mark. We were all headed for the cliff. Something more needed to be done.

After a review of modern thought, scientific and other, from a number of contemporary authors such as Stanislav Grof, Richard Tarnas, Joseph Kearns, Ervin Laszlo, Keiron Le Grice and Brian Swinne associated with the California Institute for Integral Studies, San Francisco and Mary Evelyn Tucker of the Forum on Religion and Ecology, New Haven, and Emeritus scholar of Social Ethics Larry Rasmussen, I found a ray of hope. But it turned out to be conditional. That is the reason I wrote this book; so that each of us in our own separate way can understand this conditionality.