Back in the 1960’s that was IBM’s motto, ”THINK“.  They printed it in big bold letters, on posters and desk pads, on paperweights and tie clips, and gave them out freely to customers.  It was a great marketing phrase.  Someone once said that ‘scarcity of speech leads to potency of speech.’  That one word said it all.

Humans are neither the fastest nor the strongest of species.  We cannot fly or survive in water for long unaided.  We cannot scamper up trees and would be easy prey against most preditors without our technologies.  Yet we consider ourselves at the top of the tree of evolution.  Perhaps we flatter ourselves.

Arguably our main claims to evolutionary predominance are an opposable thumb, and a very large brain.  And yet, through all our wonderful triumphs of mind, inventions of all kinds, literature and art, technology and philosophy, we are unable as a species to manage the growth of our societies in an ecologically sustainable way.

We all, each and every one of us, need to stop and think before each and everything we do for a while.  We need to re-evaluate our patterns of behavior, and indeed even of thinking itself, in the light of the crisis to which we have collectively brought our species and our world.

Life will go on.  It is a supremely adaptable force.  But life will be tested severely by a hotter and hotter world if we, humankind, does not learn to think differently about our place in the order of things.