Indeed.  I think that is the only real hope we have of averting environmental catastrophe.  We are way, way past the point where we as a species on this planet could mend our ways, do less with less, play nice with the polar bears, and revert to some prior state of existence.  There are simply too many humans alive on this planet to make such a thing even remotely possible.  And it should be obvious to anyone with a brain by now that we cannot continue on our current trajectory.  In a very real sense we have engineered ourselves into our present predicament, we just weren't really aware of the ultimate consequences of our actions.  If we do not wish to contemplate the extinction of about half or three quarters of the current human population we must begin to quite consciously engineer our way out of it.  And the very first indispensable step in doing that is to look very carefully and very honestly at the situation as it is, not as we might wish it to be.  Sorry, I seem to be channelling Donald Rumsfeld there.

Now where are we going and what's with the handbasket?