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WE LIVE IN AN ERA OF DEEP-SEATED TRANSFORMATION—a shift in civilization. Its signs and manifestations are all around us. While globalization is integrating production, trade, finance, and communication, it is producing a social and ecological backlash characterized by regional unemployment, widening income gaps, and environmental degradation. The benefits of economic growth, for long the main indicator of progress, are becoming more and more concentrated. Hundreds of millions live at a higher material standard of living, but thousands of millions are pressed into abject poverty, living in shantytowns and urban ghettos in the shadows of ostentatious affluence. This is socially and politically explosive: it fuels resentment and revolt and provokes massive migration from the countryside to the cities, and from the poorer to the richer regions. In such conditions organized crime, already growing into a global enterprise, finds fertile ground with a gamut of activities ranging from information fraud to traffic in arms, drugs, and human organs.

The application of new technologies, another indicator of progress, is a two-edged sword. Nuclear power promises an unlimited supply of commercial energy, but disposal of nuclear wastes and decommissioning aging reactors pose unsolved puzzles, and the specter of nuclear meltdown, whether due to technical accident or intentional terrorism, remains unchallenged. Genetic engineering has a fabulous potential for creating virus-resistant and protein-rich plants, improved breeds of animals, vast supplies of animal proteins, and microorganisms capable of producing proteins and hormones and improving photosynthesis. But genetic engineering can also produce lethal biological weapons and pathogenic microorganisms, destroy the diversity and the balance of nature, and create abnormal—and abnormally aggressive—insects and animals.

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Our information technologies could create a globally interacting yet locally diverse civilization, enabling all people to be linked whatever their culture and ethnic or national origin. But if these networks remain dominated by the power groups that brought them into being, they will serve only the narrowly focused interests of a small minority of people and marginalize the rest. If the Internet, television, and the electronic and print media become further commercialized, these media will cater to the demands of those who have the means to enter the global marketplace rather than giving voice to all people. Worse than that, the cyberspace of telecommunications could become a new medium for information warfare, intolerant cultural influences, pornography, and crime.

But the macroshift today harbors not only danger; it is also the cradle of opportunity. Our globalized technological civilization could break down in chaos and anarchy—or it could break through to a more humane and sustainable world. The choice between these possibilities will not be made by applying technological fixes or implementing strategies based on the same kind of thinking that created today’s unsustainabilities. As this report will show, to master our destiny we need new thinking, new values—a new consciousness.

In this opening Part we first review the nature and dynamics of macroshifts, and then describe how they came about in history and how the one we now experience is unfolding in the contemporary world. We then outline the factors that influence its unfolding and show that they are not written in the stars but depend on the evolution of our values and behaviors. The oft-neglected value-sensitivity of macroshifts is what opens for us a real opportunity to choose our destiny—and the unprecedented responsibility to choose it wisely.