Writing words like these --  The world is at risk! -- is to take on the role of Chicken Little, lamenting the falling sky to people who have heard it all a thousand times. We have been exposed to similar words of alarm over and over and over again since the dawn of the atomic age.  News of our impending extinction is now positively dull and mundane, with no power to move us.  

Even if we do understand the dire nature of the situation, it still near impossible to rouse ourselves to alarm.  The usual analogy to insert here is of those idiot frogs, slowly being cooked to death in that pan of heating water, when they are perfectly capable of jumping out.  But that analogy has become mundane, too. 

Complacency is without a doubt the scourge of our age.  We are all infected by it to one degree or another.  And so, the motivation to shake off habit and apathy will not come from outside warnings or logical arguments. The decision to leap across the chasm between words and action has to come from within, and is most often an emotional realization that hits out of nowhere. 

Here is how the realization hit me:

In 2007 , my then ten-year-old son and I were walking the dog around our neighborhood on our regular evening stroll. It was unseasonably warm for October, even by Arizona standards, and I said something about global warming. 

“What’s global warming?” my son asked.

The feelings of dismay that rushed through me at that moment literally knocked the breath out of me.  I had no idea he didn’t know about global warming -- hadn’t discussed it at school or absorbed it from conversations at the dinner table or from television.  My older children knew, without any explanation from me, and had long since learned how to make gallows humor cracks about it.

But my youngest boy, my baby boy, he somehow didn’t know, and I was overwhelmed at the thought of explaining to him the facts -- that his future is in peril, that the world in which he feels so safe and so eager to grow up -- may soon be unlivable because of our own inability to live differently.

I could barely get out my short, matter-of-fact explanation because I was so caught in the throes of realizing, right there on the dark street two blocks from my house, that I may someday have to watch my children and grandchildren die in some terrible environmental cataclysm.

As we continued our walk, I felt the weight of this possibility settle on me, and all I wanted to do was weep and wail in regret, tell my son how sorry I was that I haven’t done more to stop it.  Because it seemed unavoidably clear to me that I have shirked my responsibility to him -- to all my children.  From the moment each child was born, it became my responsibility to create a future for that child, and what have I done?  Not enough.  Not nearly enough

I am now working hard to move from words to action.  I am also working hard to convince you to do the same.  Whether you were ever part of the New Age or not, if you are an idealist, it is your mission to save the world.  It is your mission, and mine, to reach out to our fellow idealists and work together to create change.

We don’t have the right to refuse this mission.  We don’t have the right to be concerned only for ourselves anymore.  It is a moral imperative, and if we avoid it, then we become accessories to the wholesale destruction of the race.

But I have realized one more thing since that memorable walk with my son around my neighborhood.  I have learned that waking up to reality, while painful for a time, is not a bad thing. I have learned that in saying -- The world is at risk! -- I am not necessarily spreading bad news.  In fact, if this reality actually gains our attention and motivates us to change, it might be the best possible news.

“We should not fear this challenge,” says Al Gore of global warming.  “We should welcome it.”           

The challenge of a world at risk gives us the chance to step outside our own small selves with our own small concerns and become bigger people, better people.  This challenge offers us a golden opportunity to grow and expand and move up the spiral of development, and evolve into a true global community. This challenge offers us the chance to tap into the power of a spiritual identity, and at last create a new age which fulfills its promise of ushering in a better world for us all.

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