In the pages that follow you will find a story about Earth’s currently most successful large creature – the human being. But Earth’s currently most successful large creature is now in a predicament; a predicament brought about by a compelling combination of human traits and its (relatively) recent discovery of vast stores of fossil flammable fuel. Humans ’ recent discovery of flammable rock and liquid in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas has temporarily turbocharged humanity’s energy use and biomass. This “Carbon Pulse” is a brief period of human history in which much of the carbon sequestered as these substances over hundreds of millions of years is expended in just a few centuries. The resulting impacts on wealth, economies, and ecologies are earth-shattering. Humans are reaching the end of the carbon pulse. Now we face a time of change that requires a quality of “ systems thinking ” and future planning never before required of our species. You read this from a tiny spot in our enormous galaxy where energy, matter and deep time have converged to create something wholly greater than energy, matter, and time; as life — once simply created — has invested billions of years in continually re-inventing itself, attaining qualities we are only beginning to understand and appreciate. And wonder of wonders, we are related to all of it and all of them, brothers, sisters and cousins; there is no known life in the universe outside of this close family. We bring to this
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