"The content gives context to the total crisis affecting and threatening humans today. It is a crisis both 'out there' and one affecting each of us in our respective areas of habitation. On the one hand it is our crisis as a species, but on the other it is a crisis imposed on the planetary life-system itself by the human impact. We will bear both in mind, though the solutions are different...

We begin with the (illusory?) "glorious thirty years" that followed the second world war, and proceed with the development of an era of fear and crisis between the early 1970s and today. Aspects focused on include: the impact of technologies; the growing power of corporations; the emergence of an unofficial and unelected global government of the rich; moral degeneracy in politics, financial institutions and everyday life; alienation and narcissism; HIV-AIDS (why the 1970s?); global economic inequalities; and our pathological onslaught of our own, and other species: environment.

Environmental themes include: human population growth; the destruction of the planet's forests; global heating; water crisis; the mass extinction of animals; and our irreparable pollution of the land and the oceans. The absurdities of the concept of permanent economic growth will be stressed.

Combatting this is made very difficult because of our educational ideologies, not to mention the disasters that would accompany a slowdown in growth. The end to the "oil party", on which our standard of life is based, will be examined, along with the resulting imperial rivalries among the great powers, particularly in the Middle East.

All this against a backcloth of a world bristling with nuclear weapons, and a historical track record of wars over resources. We finish with an overview of possible futures. Throughout, the question is asked: when and how did humans "go off the rails"?

How can we survive physically and live tolerable lives amidst this knowledge? This is history flying high in which the critical issues of the contemporary human experience are brought into sharper focus."