If you are literate or watch television you know something about the Chinese miracle. How China is growing to be one of the great economies and powers on the planet. How it will soon be one of the most prosperous and populous nations in the world. If there are any worries they are usually described in military terms, or in the context of economic competition. What doesn’t often get discussed is that this prosperity, like our own, at least using the economic models we adhere to, comes at a cost. It is destroying the earth. Like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, who appear one by one in the Bible, a fourth defining trend of the 21st century is emerging. Joining Global Warming, Pandemics, and religious strife, we must add the cancer of unconscious growth. Growth which does not factor in the complex living interrelationships which collectively run the earth. The general assumption is that civilizations fail because of outside forces that impact upon them. It is a standard view of history. The destruction of the Mesoamerican civilizations because of the invasion of European conquistadors […]