More Than a Rock, 2nd Edition

56Big Thoughts

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

—Walt Whitman

We live in momentous times, although I don’t think many people ponder this fact in the course of daily life, which is a shame. We are in the midst of a mass extinction of life on planet Earth, and by now have irrefutable evidence that many of the things we take for granted as characteristic of human experience will not be sustainable for much longer, and will at some point in the foreseeable future need to change if we, and many other species, are to persist. In the words of Jared Diamond, “the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question ...