We must, however, reflect on what is happening. It is an urgent matter, especially for those of us who still live in a meaningful, even a numinous, earth community. We have not spoken. Nor even have we seen clearly what is happening. The issue goes far beyond economics, or commerce, or poetics, or an evening of pleasantries as we look out over a scenic view. Something is happening beyond all this. We are losing splendind and intimate modes of divine presence. We are, perhaps, losing ourselves.

It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself.

Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being.

Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur, but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is also the larger dimension of our being.

Of all the issues we are concerned with at present, the most basic issue, in my estimation, is that of human-earth relations.

Survival in any meaningful sense is the key issue of our time.

The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.

All human professions, institutions, and activities must be integral with the earth as the primary self-nourishing, self-governing and self-fulfilling community. To integrate our human activities within this context is our way into the future.

The real skill is to raise the sails and to catch the power of the wind as it passes by.

The future rests in the religious, political, economic and cultural capacity of humans to establish this larger context in which the particular traditions will find both support and fulfillment in a functional global community.