We have a narrow window of opportunity to organize society and get everyone on a sustainable path in preparation for the next stage of humanity’s development. The key to turning things around is a new global education using a method that will provide people of all ages and backgrounds with basic information about global processes. The goal will be to allow Davos-like messages about the new interconnected reality to trickle down to the mainstream.

Why the sudden urgency? Social scientists studying networks explain that after reaching a certain degree of interconnectivity, the networks start obeying rules of their own, rules distinct from the people who form the networks. Our global economy has reached that tipping point, where what researchers call emergent properties begin to cause conventional economic models and other models of governance to go haywire. New attributes of the whole have arisen from the interaction and interconnection of the people and nations that compose it, and the result is collapsing financial systems, increasing depression, divorce, and even skyrocketing numbers of children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

A central aspect of this process is how our current consumption culture is depleting natural resources, polluting the planet, eroding our collective values, and has successfully produced an entire generation of greedy, self-centered people. Nature can no longer allow us to get away with this self-destructive behavior. We must come to terms with the fact that in today’s world we should only feed, clothe, and equip ourselves with basic necessities, and nothing more.

Yet there is really nothing to complain about. We agreed to this system and live with it out of general consensus. The whole world contributes to making it work. Slowly but surely, over the last 100 years our entire value system has declined. A person’s bank account has become the standard by which one is measured. The more stuff we acquire, the more initiative we take, the more valued we become in the eyes of society. Once society began agreeing to this culture of consumption and money over knowledge, we essentially carved out our own destinies.

During the next ten years, humanity will have to decide whether it wants to embark on a path of correcting its ways— which will cause Nature’s treatment of us to change instantly, or to begin a war of annihilation.