From earliest times, culture has sought to transcend and replace the uncertainties of nature with a controllable human world. The quest for the Ideal has led Man to the creation of an artificial environment — a second nature.

Blind faith in technology and economic growth now threatens collapse of both nature and civil society. New technologies express ancient dreams of immortality, freedom from embodiment and pain, and unlimited control of matter in man-made environments. But nature is not an artifact and may never be fully understood or controlled. While immortality and disembodied life may be delusion, this does not prevent the creation of dangerous new entities in the irrational search for divine power. Superintelligence, artificial life, nanotechnology, or genetic engineering could defeat the reasoned use of technology to improve human life-if we fail to contain them or use them for universal benefit.

Both technology and economics reflect the masculine drives for power and subjective freedom that underlie consumerism. The gender imbalance of modern patriarchy must be deeply rectified, not through the right of women to pursue a male model, but through the insistence of women and men alike to guide society sanely toward a more feminine vision.

While artificial organisms could displace human or all life, the global investment economy is a profit machine that already displaces local economies and ecologies, reducing the world to a monoculture, while siphoning declining wealth into ever fewer hands.

The world's economic disparities and the destruction of nature must be met by refusing corporate entitlement and the globalist consumer and investment economy. The answer to these threats is a new localism grounded in community and common sense.