Until we change our values, we will continue to make our planet less and less able to support life, including our own and those who follow us.

Underlying the multitude of decisions that face us daily, including especially those that we tend to postpone making, is the root-level question, "are you willing and ready to support life?" This comprises the life of yourself and your family, your species (across the planet, and into the future), the biosphere (all of life: biodiversity conservation), and its ecosphere (life's supportive environments: habitat conservation).

Recognising this question as being concerned with the ‘real' bottom line, for which all other ‘bottom lines' must serve, requires levels of personal empowerment, awareness, vision, and clarity of values that most of us, deep down, wish we had, but know that we don't.

Key stepping stones towards being able to answer this question are the many small meaningful expressions of personal daring in each of these areas that all of us have experienced, both in ourselves and others. By recognising these expressions as the foundations for the emergence of a genuine sustainable culture, and building on them, we can, I believe, advance to the next stage in our species' psychosocial evolution: from manipulative, fearful, patterned, distracted and compensatory cultures to ones that are enabling of life, love, spontaneity and presence.

These are core qualities that all of our institutional structures and processes (our political, economic, business, learning, health and social systems) need to be designed and managed to enable.