Many things complicate our ability to recognize threats to the species. Not the least of these many may be contained in the observation of Soren Kierkegard: "Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward."

This Janus-faced view of life comes right out of the old linear swamp. It carries an attractive sense of reality, but it assumes that our affairs flow with an absolute linearity from way back there to somewhere wa-a-a-ay up front. This allows for no optical illusions in time, no compressions or expansions, and it ignores much of our latest computer hardware (ten billion years in a nanosecond) as well as other odd Einsteinian curves and spirals that intrude upon our consensus reality. It's well to recognize the low probability that one lonely cause underlies any event that inflicts itself upon an entire species. Neither Hitler nor Einstein sprang from a spontaneous and singular generating event. Worldwide pollution has no singular origin.

Yet, the linear orientation of our perceptions (1, 2, 3...;A, B, C...;Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...;January, February, March...) makes it extremely difficult to break away from the belief that we occupy a universe where there are straightforward linked cause-and-effect events plus a few other odd events we call accidents. We are habituated to a noncircular, noninclusive way of interpreting a universe whose circularity and all-inclusiveness keep cropping up in the phenomena we investigate. Events of tomorrow do change our view of yesterday; an ancient Greek's accident is our better-understood phenomenon. The linear habit remains, however. It dictates that we consign accidents to the unconscious. We keep loading the unconscious with events we do not understand. This burden inflicts itself upon our sense of reality.

Devotion to that linear consensus leads us inexorably into a confrontation with the mathematician who tells us: "We inevitably are led to prove any proposition in terms of unproven propositions." He's telling me that all of my pet beliefs inevitably go back to a moment where I am forced to say: "I believe this because I believe it." Faith!

Mathematics and physics may yet drive the odd realities over the brink. For instance, we now can project complex models of human societies through analogue computers and within a few seconds get impressive readouts on the consequences of paper decisions projected for hundreds of years. This is, of course, subject to the omnipresent warning pasted over computers operated by cautious men of science. That warning reads: "Garbage in - garbage out."

In engineering terms, we are looking for resultants-- sums of social forces through which to examine our world. This often produces a more realistic approach than taking up the components one by one. Any auto mechanic know there are engine problems for which it's better to make ten adjustments at once. Still, singularity as a belief confounds our attempts to "repair the system."

Technological playthings distort and amplify our performances to the point where we may believe we are discovering futures that we invent in the present. This may be the most elemental reality we have ever encountered, but the distortions born of mating our unexamined desires to our technology have tangled future and present almost inextricably. Future/past/present--, they remain so interwoven deep in the species' psyche that our day-to-day activities are often concealed from us. We put out our own Warfarin, unaware of lethal consequences and forgetful of where we have hidden it.

Few who examine our planetwide problems doubt that we live in a Warfarin world. The thrust of my argument is that we are not raising our awareness to the level demanded by the times, we are not making the connections between poisons and processes -- to the despair of our species.