Stars glow for bil­lions of years, while we burn out in about a cen­tu­ry. If not in our infan­cy, our species is still in a nascent form, not unlike ram­bunc­tious kinder­garten­ers or inse­cure teens. In what ways do we want to grow up?

“One day while I was sip­ping some groove juice I real­ized / That in the span of time we’re just babies / It’s all rel­a­tive, time is unre­al / We’re just babies, we’re just babies, man.” — But­ter­fly, Diga­ble Plan­ets, “Exam­i­na­tion of What”

We are made up of the same atoms that were once stars before they explod­ed eons ago. Life and death cycle through­out time and space. The birth of the cos­mos was either the begin­ning of life or the death of what­ev­er void exist­ed before. Regard­less, life and death are just about the only two things we can all count on. Nei­ther can exist with­out the other.

What cre­at­ed the cos­mos? We can’t say for sure, but we do know that unique set of con­di­tions marked a dis­tinc­tive moment in the biog­ra­phy of life. Life ebbs and flows, finds expres­sion in many forms, but goes into infin­i­ty, through an ongo­ing series of begin­nings. And to what end?

“The cos­mos is with­in us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the uni­verse to know itself.”— Carl Sagan

In the book, Liv­ing With the Stars: How the Human Body Is Con­nect­ed to the Life Cycles of the Earth, the Plan­ets, and the Stars, Pro­fes­sor of Pathol­o­gy Iris Schri­jver, and her hus­band, astro­physi­cist Karel Schri­jver, help explain how star­dust finds its way into our bod­ies. Part of that dust is made up of hydro­gen, the fun­da­men­tal ele­ment that was cre­at­ed with the birth of our uni­verse. The hydro­gen in our water and in our bod­ies is the rem­nants of that mys­te­ri­ous ini­tial spark.⁹

There are still many mys­ter­ies of our exis­tence to dis­cov­er. The uni­verse is an end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing place, evi­denced by the far­thest reach­es of what we have seen. The Hub­ble tele­scope has allowed us to reveal about 100 bil­lion galax­ies in the uni­verse. And, in each galaxy there are approx­i­mate­ly 100 bil­lion stars. Our own Milky Way galaxy is esti­mat­ed to con­tain more than 10 bil­lion plan­ets.¹⁰ Thanks to NASA’s Kepler space­craft, the num­ber of exo­plan­ets dis­cov­ered out­side our solar sys­tem con­tin­ues to dra­mat­i­cal­ly grow.¹¹

Accord­ing to a cal­cu­la­tion report­ed in Forbes, the num­ber of poten­tial­ly hab­it­able Earth-like plan­ets in our uni­verse is more than 10 to the 22nd pow­er.¹² The impli­ca­tion here is that there are expo­nen­tial pos­si­bil­i­ties for all the diverse types of life-forms with which we may share the universe.

Every end coin­cides with a new begin­ning. Death marks an end of a sort, but cer­tain­ly not the end. Life evolves through cre­ativ­i­ty —a potent force as expressed through diverse exam­ples of pro­cre­ation, self-real­iza­tion, col­lec­tive actu­al­iza­tion, and inno­va­tion. Human­i­ty must con­tin­ue to evolve at this cur­rent, crit­i­cal world­wide inflec­tion point, not only tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, but also soci­etal­ly and eco­log­i­cal­ly. We believe in the pow­er of respon­si­bil­i­ty and renew­al to change course from dis­as­ter to the heal­ing uplift of a won­drous rise.

“We are evo­lu­tion evolv­ing through us. We are the great cre­ative process, express­ing itself unique­ly through each of us. We are the uni­verse in per­son.”— Bar­bara Marx Hubbard

To get our­selves onto a path of sus­tain­abil­i­ty, the cur­rent sta­tus quo will have to expe­ri­ence a kind of death. And, in par­tic­u­lar, we will wit­ness death to the oil industry—itself an indus­try of death, drudg­ing up deposits that’ve been dead for about 60 mil­lion years and burn­ing that death in our engines and pow­er plants.

“So we stand for life. Let’s pow­er a new civ­i­liza­tion based on a liv­ing sun, based on the liv­ing wind, based on the liv­ing imag­i­na­tion of our chil­dren and based on the clean­li­ness, and the puri­ty, and the sacred­ness of our water.”
— Van Jones, speak­ing at a Dako­ta Access Pipeline protest

Regen­er­a­tive change begins with learn­ing how to lessen our excess­es and lis­ten to the  wis­dom liv­ing and breath­ing all around us. We should go forth with rev­er­ence for life, the almighty force that con­tin­u­ous­ly finds the most spec­tac­u­lar and beau­ti­ful ways to exist.

We believe that, as a species, we are only just begin­ning to come into our con­scious­ness. And yet, we tend to be pret­ty proud of our­selves already, with some good enough rea­sons. In the space of a geo­log­i­cal blink, we’ve estab­lished our­selves as the pre-emi­nent life-forms on Earth. We even named our­selves “homo sapi­ens”, Latin for “wise man”. Takes a lot of con­fi­dence to call our­selves wise, espe­cial­ly when we quite often act like fools. What we des­per­ate­ly need is humil­i­ty. Our lack of humil­i­ty is evi­denced by how we scar nat­ur­al land­scapes to fit our out­sized needs. Fur­ther proof appears in a hazy night sky, where light pol­lu­tion from noc­tur­nal human activ­i­ty com­pro­mis­es a view of the cosmos.

Dur­ing this time of seem­ing­ly end­less tech­no­log­i­cal accel­er­a­tion, we should remain mind­ful that we’re still strug­gling to grasp some basic fun­da­men­tal truths. We still need to learn how to live peace­ful­ly and sus­tain­ably on this plan­et. We should rec­og­nize the nat­ur­al wis­dom we’re los­ing in our rapid expan­sion across land and through irre­spon­si­ble use of resources. We must also show greater appre­ci­a­tion for the ancient wis­doms of indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties being mar­gin­al­ized in the name of progress.

We feel oblig­at­ed to acknowl­edge that our com­mand of sci­ence is still nascent. We are still so far from any­thing that could tru­ly be described as an advanced species. This recog­ni­tion of our rel­a­tive infan­cy should be a fur­ther call for humil­i­ty in the pres­ence of nature. Our tech­no­log­i­cal abil­i­ty is not in doubt, but how we choose to use it is often ques­tion­able. How else might we focus our tech­no­log­i­cal efforts? As writer Anand Girid­haradas said in response to the devel­op­ment of a super­son­ic jet, “What would that kind of resource of trea­sure and also of intel­lect do if it were deployed to think about pub­lic trans­porta­tion in Amer­i­ca? What would that do if it were deployed to think about the cli­mate change prob­lem?”¹³

Humans have moved from a pre­dom­i­nant­ly agrar­i­an glob­al soci­ety, focused on grow­ing an abun­dance of food and cash crops, into a large­ly com­mer­cial soci­ety, focused on grow­ing prof­it mar­gins for any­thing that can be sold. Com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion seeps into all avenues of life. This is hard­ly an ide­al sit­u­a­tion. We won­der more what humanity’s next glob­al shift might entail. Our incli­na­tion is that a mis­use of resources could be cur­tailed by first rec­og­niz­ing the rela­tion between our resource use, and the over­all health of our plan­et and its diverse species.

We do not believe a slick mobile app or iter­a­tive algo­rithm will offer the solu­tions to our larg­er soci­etal prob­lems. Rather, we think it’s cru­cial we look out­side of our screens and start imag­in­ing large-scale changes in how we expe­ri­ence our place in the world. What will it take to stop rely­ing on fos­sil fuels for our cars and air­planes and to trav­el with zero emis­sions instead? Coun­tries, like Nor­way, have demon­strat­ed a com­mit­ment to answer­ing this ques­tion in their pledge to achieve zero-emis­sions air trav­el by 2040.¹⁴ For the time being, hydro­gen fuel cell pow­er is pro­vid­ing inroads into deal­ing with this mas­sive world­wide issue, but this advance­ment amounts to a baby step in the jour­ney toward com­plete sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Sure­ly, we can all con­tin­ue to exer­cise our imag­i­na­tions more effec­tive­ly toward tack­ling this exis­ten­tial threat to our species and planet.