All of us breathe from the same atmosphere, drink the same waters, and are fed from the land.

All of us depend, more than we can know, on the stability of the same biogeochemical cycles, including the movement of carbon from plants to the atmosphere, oceans, soils, and living creatures.

All of us are vulnerable to the remorseless workings of the large numbers that govern Earth systems.

All of us are stitched to a common fabric of life, kin to all other life forms.

All of us are products of the same evolutionary forces and carry the marks of our long journey in time.

Each of us is a small part of a common story that began three billion years ago.

We are all made of stuff that was once part of stars, and we will all become dust to be remade someday into other life forms.

As persons, we are visitors on the Earth for only a brief moment. As a species, however, we are in our adolescence, and as is common at that stage of life we live dangerously. Specifically, we have created three ways to commit suicide: by nuclear annihilation, by ecological degradation, and, as computer scientist Bill Joy notes, by the consequences of our own cleverness eviction by technologies that can self-replicate and might one day find Homo sapiens useless and inconvenient.