We have moved from roughly 1000 years of the agricultural age, through about 200 years of the industrial age, and now we have popped out of the 40-year old information age.

The key accomplishments are: a population explosion, and an addiction to all things virtual and visual.

We need to switch our focus from present hedonistic consumerism to a brighter future positive, personally, within our communities, nationally and globally.

It is time we seriously work towards cleaning up the mess we have made and help restore our planet to its proper health-giving status, not this health-destructive mode.

Science and technology is spurred on by our creativity and imagination. Nothing is impossible anymore – what we can imagine, we can create. The future is now.

We can be present hedonistic takers and use up our precious resources without thought of our responsibility to future generations; leave them high and dry to figure a way to clean up the mess and chaos we have left behind.

Or we can be future-oriented givers. We can use our expanded imagination to create a brighter, more positive future and work towards leaving a legacy of hope and Love.

The real issue is what kind of mental world shall people inhabit? What kinds of hope shall be permitted? What kind of value systems shall be allowed?

And the value systems that aggrandise the possession of things, the tearing up of the Earth, competition, classism, racism, sexism, have led us to the brink of catastrophe.

Now, I think we have to abandon Western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body in connection with the plants.

That’s the seamless web that leads us back into the heart of nature; and if we can do this, then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be navigated.

Very little of the past can be saved. The architectonics, the machines, the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda, the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic canons, very little of that can be saved.

But what can be saved is the sense of Love and caring, and mutuality, that we all put into and take from the Human enterprise.

You know, there’s a Grateful Dead song that says ‘You can’t go back and you can’t stand still. If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will.’

But it’s a cultural test. Nature is pitiless. Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which a great deal has been writ; but if it proves inadequate, nature will cover it over with the same kind of cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs and the trilobites and the crossopterygian fishes, and all those other folks that came before.

So what we must do, I think, is see our future in the imagination. Catalyse the imagination. Form symbiotic relationships with the plants. Affirm archaic values. And spread the good news that what is out of control, what is in fact dying, is a World that had become too top-heavy with its own hubris, too bent by its own false value systems, and too dehumanised to care about what happened to its own children.

So I say, good riddance to it! Bring on the archaic revival, and let’s create a new World!