I enjoyed your essay and I wish I could share your optimism— that we still have adaptive choices about our collective future. But the accelerating climate catastrophe—driven by an array of interlocking global feedback loops we can no longer control or reverse—coupled with the worldwide collapse of civil society and democracy into warring tribes and brutal fascist tyranny, and the unremitting assault on reason we see throughout corporate or government-sponsored mass propaganda (e.g. Fox “news” or Russian and Chinese state media) have all eroded any hope I might have for anything other than a catastrophic collapse and mass die-off of most of humanity and the climate-dependent ecosystems that support us. Another inexorable truth about complex adaptive systems—from single cells to organisms to ecosystems to Gaia, and from families to organizations to communities to societies to the “International Community”—is that they are ALL impermanent. Like plants, they sprout, grow, flourish, compete for resources, flower, wither, and die, returning to the source. We have reached the withering point of the “flower” of global techno-industrial civilization, and as the climate heats up more and more rapidly, we will all just die, whether of violence, starvation, disease, or despair. I wish it were otherwise, but as Shakespeare wrote, “Thou knowst ‘tis common: all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.”