Really excellent diary.  So, who are the new leaders and what criteria are we to judge them by?  I mean, what's to stop a new leader repeating the tiring methods of the old leaders?  New ideas, I suppose.  What will take the place of capital accumulation, given that some humans need to feel themselves "somewhere near the top" of whatever cultural tree we're climbing...really excellent diary Cassiodorus...summing up the bind we're in.  Assuming for a moment that Chris Cook's idea about value transaction societies, where you start with something of value to someone else and then exchange brings culture...then the question is: how to get from here to there?  What does who need to hear or see or taste or smell or touch or...well...I think, as melo has said, that the rich need to kick back, work less, take a pay cut, enjoy what they have, walk about their property rather than driving and flying from here to there.  Take a stroll around the neighbourhood rather than sitting inside with everything switched on.  Buying stuff and then not buying any more stuff because they're too busy using the stuff they bought...I remember a guy, this is many years ago, he was a computer guy earning good money for inserting a floppy disk into a computer, moving a few files, then clicking on an .exe file and waiting ten minutes....we'd chat in those ten minutes...he must have been loading all of our computers, so there were a series of ten minute chats.  He was into music software and hardware.  I wanted to buy a digital recording studio, but I wasn't sure.  A computer and digitial recording software seemed more feasible.  But there was this one digital recording box, it was....a lot of money.  He bought one.  So the next time I saw him I said, "So, what's it like?"  "You know what?" he said.  "I haven't had time to take it out of the box."  Next time I met him he still hadn't taken it out of the box.  And the next time after that he'd bought another two shiny toys, not to mention the sports car he was lusting to rent.  "You pay X a month.  When you run out of money, you give it back."

So...leadership, at all levels, from the individual up and back down to the individual...the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  How to negotiate the change?  No politician wants that responisibility, it seems, or can think clearly within that headspace.  Too kooky!  Life cannot be that much in peril.  So yes, highlighting the number of species dying out.  A friend of mine said, "The large mammals are all dying out."  Except for us, cows, pigs, sheep, dogs....  

...hey!  Great writing, great reading!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.