Last weekend, I was one of hundreds attending the international conference, Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, at UC Santa Cruz. The primary question driving the conference was "How can humans and other species coexist on the planet?" I came away, I think, with a better understanding of how humans, as brainy as we claim to be, have managed to get ourselves and other Earth inhabitants in such a pickle — with climate change, mass extinction, and accumulation of pesticides in our food and water systems.

I also came away believing that we must acknowledge how we got into this mess before we can make the changes in old ways of thinking and interacting with the world — changes needed to reverse the trend.