What you see around you is the result of thousands upon thousands of years of human experience. Knowledge and wisdom passed down to us from all our ancestors. And while the crisis back on Earth may be human-made, the story of life is the story of crises. Of facing them. Adapting and surviving. There have always been blights and pestilences that challenged our forebears. It now falls to us to use the knowledge they bequeathed us, to find a path to flourishing.” She gazed at the lush plants. “Here we have begun the process of learning how to build from scratch the biosphere from which we evolved — to build, beyond Earth, environments consisting of hundreds of thousands of interacting species — bacteria, fungi, invertebrates, plants, mammals, fish, birds, and more. This will be the key to safeguarding Earth’s legacy, of which humanity is just one small part.

If we are not graced with an instinctive knowledge of how to make our technologized world a safe and balanced ecosystem, we must figure out how to do it. We need more scientific research and more technological restraint. It is probably too much to hope that some great Ecosystem Keeper in the sky will reach down and put right our environmental abuses. It is up to us. It should not be impossibly difficult. Birds — whose intelligence we tend to malign — know not to foul the nest. Shrimps with brains the size of lint particles know it. Algae know it. One-celled microorganisms know it. It is time for us to know it too.

Most people live in a world others have created for them. But you can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to negative ones. Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.

We can only change our lives and create a world of our own if we first understand how such a world is constructed, how it works, and the rules of the game.

Build therefore your own world.

In the meantime, if you're not into the world you live in, you can build your own world around you.[...]Surround yourself with books and objects that you love. Tape things up on the wall. Create your own world.

Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

We are starting to direct the evolution of our biology and of our minds ourselves...As we begin to liberate our thoughts, our memes, our consciousness from the biological constraints that we presently have, this will allow us to evolve far faster and ever faster.

The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.

the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself,

We humans still have a long way to go with learning to live harmoniously with our environment and its wildlife.

Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.