Here is a story about humanity writing its own story.
Every life form is part of that story, and we humans, you and I, are also authors of that story.
On this planet there is a very thin band of air and water and temperature that is congenial to life, as we know it.
This atmosphere has been relatively stable for some thousands of years since the last ice age, and in that time life on this planet has flourished.
Over thousands of years humans have developed through short-lived family groups, tribes and nomadic culture to make tools and grow crops and domesticate animals and live in interdependent and stable communities.
In the last hundreds of years, in urban communities, we have been able to develop social systems that better support each other, care for each other, and increase our numbers. In concert we have developed more advanced industrial systems such as resource extraction, manufacture, trade and consumption.
And in the last tens of years the digit arrived and changed everything.
But the environmental systems that support these developments have not advanced. They have evolved over millions of years, however, the evolutionary ability to adapt is not keeping pace with our exponential acts of production, consumption and waste.
And these actions and our behaviour are resulting in global warming and a planet that is becoming less congenial to life.
There is a valid argument that humans are not adapting either.
There is one story, now how will it end?
If we are to continue to develop as a species and to conserve life, we must slowdown our production, consumption and waste and slow down the warming of the planet to provide time for the environmental systems that we depend upon to recover, stabilise and find balance.
We have solutions to address climate change and we are solely responsible for action and we are running out of time.
We are the only chance we have and now is the only time we have.
We are part of the biggest story ever which is about our behaviours and how we adapt the systems and practice of production, consumption and waste to find balance.
Survival and diversity within this thin habitable band of life, depends on us accepting this role.
The digit is a switch, an electrical pulse, a yes-no, on-off, zero-to-one proposition and humanity, in all our complexity and curiosity, is not that simple and we need to manage the digit.
The digit advances our development and accelerates our ability to produce and consume but it also provides an opportunity to develop systems of conservation and sustainable practice.
So we have three converging stories; climate change in response to human activity, digital machine learning towards artificial, emotional & predictive intelligence and human adaption to both of these forces that we currently do not manage well.
The story we are writing today is one of sustainable practice and using the digit to develop systems that find balance.
We are faced today with a yes-no choice to change our behaviour to one of stewardship and responsibility, or to warm the planet.
And the IPCC will deliver a report on how we are going.
