This book provides perspective on today's planetary crisis by seeing it as a transition within the larger picture of human social evolution. Jay Earley develops a model that explains how social evolution has led not only to worthwhile achievements but to moral horrors and the current world crisis as well.

He argues that certain ground qualities were present at the beginnings of our social evolution, such as natural living, belonging, vitality, community, and equality and that over the span of human history certain emergent qualities developed to give us a greater power in the world, such as technology, social organization, and rational thinking. In developing these latter qualities we have suppressed the ground qualities, however, at the expense of our health and wholeness.

The next step in social evolution, Earley argues, is to take conscious charge of our future by integrating the ground qualities with the emergent qualities so that they can continue to evolve, but in a healthy way.