Five years — the length of time Shades of Green has now been published — is exceedingly brief In the great march of history. Yet, given the hyperactive age in which we live, much has changed. The expanding digital revolution is flooding us with ever increasing amounts of information, a process that can be both overwhelming and enlightening. Indeed, computers, satellites and communication systems are inundating us with insights we never before had about the astounding complexity and amazing integrity of the utterly unique planet on which we live. It's also telling us of a planet in peril, defining this time in our shared history with Earth as literally the most critical in human civilization.

This is not an exaggeration. In the 12,000 years since we changed from being nomadic hunters to farmers, global temperatures have been extremely stable and accommodating. During the last 200 years, primarily because of industrialization and our burning of fossil fuels, we have raised the planet's average temperature by 0.8°C. Our existing emissions probably commit us to a 2.0°C increase, and perhaps 4-6°C by the end of this century. We have set in motion destabilizing climate conditions that are unprecedented in our history.

While this risky experiment is underway, we are also trying to feed and supply a world population of 6.58 billion people who are increasingly hungry for material comforts. In addition to altering worldwide climate patterns, we are exhausting fresh water supplies, destroying ecologically critical forests, depleting soils, rapidly mining finite supplies of minerals, fishing out the seas, acidifying the oceans, expropriating nearly half the biological activity on the planet, and sending species to extinction at a rate comparable to the five other great extinctions during the last 500 million years, all while poisoning the biosphere with our exotic chemical concoctions. Exhausting supplies of oil are actually the least of our problems.

Some people were aware of these looming crises five years ago. Many more people are aware of them now. What has changed is the pervasiveness of concern. The frightening prospects are now entering the public and corporate imagination as a "sea-change" in attitude. The worry is just beginning to translate into action.

Perhaps the greatest encouragement we have for this action is foresight. Scientific measurement and modelling are creating a clear picture of a future to be avoided. International economic management may help us minimize impacts. The media, in all its many forms, may educate and democratize the difficult decisions we must make. We are beginning — just beginning — to think with a planetary consciousness.

One of the most interesting examples of this dynamic is the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). According to Dr. Spencer Weart, director of the American Institute of Physics Centre in Maryland, USA (New Scientist, Apr. 14-21/07), the IPCC was originally established "to forestall 'alarmist' declarations from self-appointed committees of scientists." To control these scientists, the IPCC was designed to commit them "to repeated rounds of study and debate, forbidding any announcement except by unanimous consensus." A process that should have become "a sure formula for paralysis" instead became its strength. "[T]he power of democratic methods, combined with rational argument, overcame all obstacles," observed Dr. Weart, "[and] the IPCC has evolved into a robust transnational institution that provides authoritative conclusions of grave significance." Indeed, the IPCC has become so authoritative that government policies are now steered by its announcements. The power of reason and open debate has created unprecedented influence.

Local newspapers and environmental columnists, each in their small and humble ways, are part of this same influential process. The role of the columnist is to be as informed, as current, as frank and as honest as possible, so that the commentary will "echo" a society's behaviour back to itself. By urging us toward awareness through the complexity of agreement and disagreement, we can recognize and possibly avert the looming environmental crisis facing us all.

As for the local newspaper, its foundational assumption is that knowing is better than not knowing. Its role is to be an open forum for news and opinion, a place where a community is in conversation with itself. The endeavour may not seem as lofty as that of the IPCC but, when repeated in innumerable locations across the country and around the world, the effect of reasoned and informed dialogue can be equally profound.

We need informed awareness as a prelude to necessary change. Redirecting the course of our modern civilization toward sustainability will also require a special bravery on the part of everyone: publishers, editors, advertisers, columnists, readers, politicians, and that amorphous reflection of our collective selves we call the public. Values will have to alter. Economies will have to be reshaped. Business will have to reinvent itself. The old ideologies that have guided us in the past will have to be adjusted so they are sensitive and responsive to environmental imperatives. We will have to discover greater efficiencies and fresh measures of usefulness.Somehow we must find those ways that allow us to live in sustainable equilibrium on a fragile planet.

Five years seems like a long time for a global civilization that is racing toward its tomorrows with reckless abandon. But we have learned much in these short years. And we have much more to learn, probably with more challenges and changes than we can imagine. Our uncertain future is quickly arriving — day by crucial day.