Although our actions for the past 150 years have lifted our civilization to new heights, it has come at a tremendous price. We are now at a point where humanity’s demands for natural resources far exceed the earth’s capacity to sustain us. The extraction and the consumption of these resources in the past two centuries have changed our climate and ecosystems so significantly, that a new geological era had to be created. For some decades now people have been talking about saving the planet, but we are realizing that this is not really the issue. The central issue is civilization itself and whether we can save it. The stresses that we have put on the earth are not only threatening our habitat, but our way of life, our prosperity and even our existence on the planet. Our current paradigm must change. We will have to accept the new reality; the human economy is part of nature and not the other way around. We are faced with great challenges, but unlike the rest of the living world, we have the unique ability to adapt and decide our fate and the fate of most of the biosphere, for better or worse, in order to survive the human project.