Industries, too, could be transformed. Most of them are based on the extraction, processing and manufacture of physical materials, which consume resources and fuels in the process. But some pioneering companies have developed factories that drastically reduce emissions by using the effluent from one industrial process as raw material for another. Kalunberg Denmark has established a network of a dozen symbiotic industries. Ash from a power-plant smokestack is used to manufacture cement, while the waste from trout farms and pharmaceutical plants is used to fertilize nearby fields. Researchers at the United Nations University in Tokyo have started a $12 million Zero Emissions Research Initiative that aims one day to make producing pollution from a factory as unacceptable as dumping sewage in the backyard is today.

The biggest challenge of all, however, may be within ourselves. The dramatic economic advances of the past century have been driven in part by a culture of materialism, and accelerated growth seems to be a universally accepted goal. But as environmental activist Edward Abbey once said, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." Unending, indiscriminate material expansion will destroy the earth's biosphere just as malignancy lays waste to the human body.

In the future we will have to focus on the quality of growth, not the amount. More software, services or human ideas do not have the environmental impact that more roads, buildings and autos do. The goal is to keep economic opportunities and jobs growing--particularly in the developing world--but to minimize the materials, energy and pollution accompanying the growth.

The new era calls for what environmental writer Alan Durning describes as a "culture of permanence"--meeting the needs of the current generation without jeopardizing the prospects of the next. Above all, survival will require a renewed appreciation for nature. Our ancestors could see their dependence on the natural world daily. They viewed trees and animals as sacred and treated them with respect. Today we need a return of that reverence. As Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould puts it, "We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature." Unless we follow Gould's advice, we may not be able to save ourselves either.