Dreaming the future can create the future.

The ecological debt we’ve incurred is dire. We’ve precipitated climate change that’s within one degree centigrade of the maximum temperature in the past million years. Leading scientists say we have ten years at best to make a massive global shift, an extreme carbon makeover. It’s show-time. We’re entering a drastic period of creative destruction. We’ve already begun to trigger what some ecologists call “regime shift,” irreversible tipping points. Global warming is getting all the ink, but other intimately interdependent issues equal its magnitude: the mass extinction of 30 to 50 percent of Earth’s biological and cultural diversity—freshwater shortages that will lead to wars, the universal poisoning of the biosphere, and the greatest extremes of inequality in modern history, a world that’s 77 percent poor.