A provocative review of our long story. My own feeling is that humanity in the aggregate has little more intelligence or foresight than yeasts in a vat of grape mash. Our explosive population growth, coupled with the accelerated devastation of our biological support systems and the accelerating pace of technological innovation are thus inevitable, once we discovered and learned to exploit the one-time bonus of cheap net energy from fossil fuels, to which we are now hopelessly addicted. And as Bob Dylan once wryly observed, “Most people don’t do what they believe in; they just do what’s most convenient, and then they repent. Our time of repentance has come, but I fear there will be no forgiveness. When any species outstrips the carrying capacity of their environment, they die off en masse. We will not be an exception to this ironclad rule of ecology, I fear.