DRAFT-DO NOT COPY-DO NOT DISTRIBUTE CHAPTER ONE THE CHALLENGE OF CO-EVOLUTION Large issues and debates often grow from a small seed. In 1969, when we saw the first pictures taken from the moon of our solitary blue green planet with snow covered poles surrounded by dark and seemingly infinite empty space, the emotional impact of that moment was profound, even overwhelming. We realized we are traveling together through dark empty space and share a common bond as co-inhabitants of the Earth. We are all Earthlings. Those images from outer space provided us with new perspectives on how our earthbound struggles – amazingly invisible from so far away – continue to challenge and divide us. Though we have managed to advance from hunter-gatherer cave-dwellers to be able to take pictures of ourselves from the moon – certainly a glorious and amazing evolution of knowledge and accomplishment – we now find ourselves at the great crossroads of yet another millennium, one in which an intense and on-going debate rages about our relationship to our home planet Earth. Today, when our astronauts gaze at our planet from space, it is bluer and less white than it was when we first looked at it from the moon. Ice sheets are melting exposing the brown earth and the blue ocean is lapping up greater expanses of low-lying areas. There are also many more lights at night and we are told if we continue to use energy at our current rate of increase, the earth could look like a dramatically re-painted planet by the end of this century; the frozen white will recede and the earth will look noticeably darker, as light-absorbing blue, green, and brown regions replace reflective white. The idea that our actions could be repainting the planet in a way that is noticeable from space is a frightening thought. But, in spite of the rhetoric and anxiety this idea inspires, we have not been able to really agree upon answers to the important questions that naturally arise: Is this warming ultimately good or bad for our planet and its inhabitants? Are we in the process of building an uninhabitable planet or could we actively design our future planet'sclimate according to our needs -- effectively, re-painting our planet to look and behave in a way that would be beneficial to us? If we could should we? Invisible to the human eye from outer space is the earth’s hot molten core which causes the surface insulated by a cladding of tectonic plates to be constantly in motion, pressing against and pushing away from each other creating earthquakes in the process. These immense forces suddenly created an earthquake along a thousand mile fault deep underwater in the Indian Ocean. It created waves that rushed towards the shores of many East Asian countries at 600 mph which then surged two miles inland once they hit land. Driven by the largest earthquake in 50 years, the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in December, 2004 killed approximately 300,000 people and made many more homeless. While tsunamis have occurred before, we were able to witness this particular catastrophe first-hand on television in dramatic footage as trees, houses and people were swept away by the raging waters. Within a year we saw images of the devastation of a second earthquake that killed 85,000 in Pakistan and rendered over 2 million people homeless and watched helplessly as the city of New Orleans was devastated by hurricane Katrina. Natural disasters seem to be more frequent and ferocious these days adding to our general concerns about our well being. Between 1990 and 1999 188 million people each year had their lives altered by natural disasters compared to 31 million per year by armed conflict. Without belaboring the point, there are many disasters we know we will occur sometime in the future that we barely think about. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helen’s caused awesome local destruction but other much more destructive super volcanic eruptions thousands of times more powerful are inevitable with one long overdue in Yellowstone National Park. Scientists are also concerned about the instability of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands that would cause an undersea landslide and create a mega tsunami that would damage much of the east coast of the United States with waves as high as one hundred-fifty feet tall. Despite global warming, glacial ice sheets could re-appear in high density population areas like New York City. And out in space, there lurks plenty of dangerous debris, including massive skyscraper-sized and larger asteroids that could again plunge to earth and wipe out a whole section of our planet.We don’t like to contemplate these natural disasters, which seem very remote, until a specific emergency occurs such as Katrina. Then, of course there’s plenty of finger-pointing as to why we weren’t prepared. An investigation revealed that the New Orleans Levees Board had spent their money to improve access to gambling casinos instead of strengthening the levees. In the future will we be as willfully unprepared for even more serious global events, to our peril? In our daily lives, we tend to take a weather-channel view of nature: lots of colorful computer charts of wind and rain and sun crisscrossing the map, all with a generally benign effect. Despite the kill-or-be-killed world of animal behavior that we can watch on Animal Planet, we see the natural world as generally beautiful and pristine, in contrast to the crowded, blighted civilization under the thrall of technology. Our scientists now know that more than 99.9 percent of all species that have inhabited Earth are now extinct including the well known cases of mammoth elephants, saber tooth tigers and millions of lesser known specie including our ancestors. Their disappearance was caused by their inability to cope with an ever-changing planet, natural disasters like climate change and asteroid impacts, and of course losing the daily fight for survival. Our own days on the planet might be even more limited since many experts believe that our misguided actions will lead to climate change, species extinctions, and our own Armageddon. Jared Diamond has pointed out in his book Collapse that many earlier human cultures became extinct because they were unable to adapt to new conditions despite the knowledge that the behavior patterns, that had initially helped them to flourish, had become destructive. A classic example is the people of Easter