Introduction

This book has been in progress in one form or another for decades. The underlying theme is the value of time, and so I ask that you read it slowly and with patience. Its subject is a plain one — the obligations we did not choose, but which are ours nonetheless. To our neighbours. To the strangers whose lives touch ours without our knowledge. To the animals and the soils, the rivers and the weather. To the generations of all of those to come.

We have grown fluent in the language of rights and forgetful of the older grammar life used to evolve over billions of years: harmonious biodiversity.

The most important concepts in this book involve:
      ·    "Inalienable Obligations"
      ·    "Harmonious Biodiversity"
      ·    "Time" (the first two build from ideas about what time is and why it is at the core of building a just society, a just and lasting civilization on a flourishing earth)

The image at the top of each page is a rising earth, biodiversity flourishing, under the umbrella of a feather, that light and powerful evolutionary development dating back to the era of the dinosaurs that flies over our heads everyday and figuratively stands for the written word. The rising earth is intended to evoke the famous image taken by the Apollo astronauts of earth rising over the moon, showing our distant green and blue, cloud-swirling planet that is where the requisite integrated biodiversity of life has evolved for billions of years, including our dependent selves.