. . . [F]or billions of years, the universe has been exploding and unfolding. Vast, unimaginable events occurred across unthinkable amounts of time, across millions of light years. Out of that primordial energy emerged new stars and planets, the Earth with its mountains and seas and rivers and trees and diverse species . . . and human beings. For thousands of years these creatures have interacted, and people have struggled to figure out who they are and what is going on and how to live and how to cooperate, to think, to build.

This cosmic convulsion has been under way for billions of years . . . for what? So that in the course of a few generations we can turn it all over to the Walt Disney Corporation? To the Time Warner Corporation? So that it can be destroyed by the Weyerhaeuser Corporation? Union Carbide Corporation? Exxon Corporation? Philip Morris Corporation? Microsoft Corporation?

. . . What are we going to do? How can we take humankind's enormous productive capacity, this enormous technological capacity, this enormous intelligence -- how do we take our nimble fingers and our facile brains, and standing upon the shoulders of people who came before us, build the self-governing, just and sensible societies which so many people in every generation since life began have sought?