Our environmental problems are the result of a fundamental disconnection between our understanding of reality and what it seems to be. In other words, we are discovering that the world doesn’t work the way we have thought it works, and that we now have to make major adjustments in how we individually and collectively behave.

Of course, we have always been doing this, both as individuals and as cultures. Our personal experiences, registered through consciousness, adjust our basic sense of reality, and cultures are always undergoing similar changes. Fundamentally new understandings totally remake us. As the media guru, Marshall McLuhan, said in one his intriguingly aphoristic reversals, “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.” Consider history.