Cesar Chavez, pacifist head of the United Farm Workers: I feel very deeply about vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who led me to question to right of humans to eat other sentient beings.

"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course." That was the apocalyptic warning uttered in 1992 by some 1700 scientists from 69 countries, including 99 of the 196 living Nobel laureates. Tragically, no one with any power is listening. In the ensuing ten years, corporate managers and political officials have only accelerated their "massive tampering with the world's interdependent web of life."

If you limited yourself to reading the New York Times or closely following the statements of major American political figures, you would be unaware that a group of the world's leading scientists has stated: "A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated." Apparently, what scares the hell out of many scientists barely registers in Washington and America's news capital, New York City.

Two views are vying for the allegiance of humankind. One is status quo--more industrialized growth, leading to a computerized world of 12 billion people surviving as a global ant heap. The other is a transformed civilization based on wisdom, restraint and caring.

This is the moment for prophets, for vision. Otherwise, the people perish. The current war on terrorism grabs the headlines. Yet, as 99 Nobel laureates proclaimed in their 1992 Warning to Humanity, the more profound dangers are insufficient food, deforestation, species loss and climate change which could trigger "unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly understand."

This is heavy stuff. It is so heavy that the conventional leaders would rather comfort us with deceptive cliches. When I was governor of California, the president of the leading Electric Utility company told me--after a fundraising dinner and drinks--that he hoped his company's nuclear power plant wouldn't go critical on his watch. He laughed and I shivered. And that is the way they talk...among the insiders.

Reflect for a moment on the popularity of Disney's gigantic amusement center in Florida. With more hotel rooms than either Los Angeles or New York, Disney has hit the tourist jackpot as the most visited vacation spot in the world. Could this be the ersatz answer to the awesome challenge of the age? Create a perfect, corporate reality that provides crime free, clean fun. Like the triumph of McDonaldization, Disneyfication of existence promises certainty and wonderfully sanitary conditions. Few will worry about soil loss or global warming or an overcrowded world haunted by hungry people if they are sufficiently soothed.

The world's scientists are blowing the whistle on a way of life. They are questioning overconsumption and straightline optimism based on auto travel, 24 hour advertising and endless increases in people and industrial waste. They are telling us to change. How?

1. Move off fossil fuels to benign, inexhaustible energy sources. The sun has boundless energy, if we have the wit to use it.
   
2. Halt deforestation, destruction of agricultural land and loss of species. Stop wasting energy, water and materials--conserve and recycle.
   
3. Support policies which help to slow population growth.
   
4. Let the United States lead by ensuring that all full time workers earn enough to support their families.

Perhaps our descendants will physically survive with 12 or 14 billion mouths but their world will not be a place any of us would desire. There will be no liberty, period. The regimentations of Hitler, Stalin and Mao will stand as mere approximations of the rationalized, new world order of total domination. Man will at last have reinvented himself--and what a horror.

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