Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future

“It is all too possible that we will fail to achieve sustainability, and that the blind watchmaker will once again…reset the balance of a severely diminished living Earth.”

That’s the possibility that Tim Flannery hopes we can yet avoid. He makes the statement early in his essay Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future, in the course of setting out his view of Earth as a living whole, following James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.

The evolutionary process has arrived at a system in which humanity can contribute intelligence and self-awareness to the functioning of Earth – or set the process at naught and turn back the evolutionary clock.

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