Humanity on a Tightrope: Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future

Paul Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies and President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. He is the author of The Population Bomb, one of the first books to bring environmental science to the general public. He has given thousands of public lectures in the past 40 years. Ehrlich is author and coauthor of over 1000 scientific papers, books, and articles in the popular press covering a range of topics from the effects of crowding on people and how consumption destroys our life-support systems to the origins of religion and the ethics of the environments. Of his some 40 books, Human Natures and The Dominant Animal have brought home the seriousness of the mismatch between human behavior and the chances of a global collapse of civilization. He has given thousands of public lectures and appearances on the electronic media. Robert Evan Ornstein is a psychologist, writer, former professor at Stanford University, and chairman of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK). He is the author of The Healing Brain, New World New Mind, and The Psychology of Consciousness. He has written or co-written more than twenty-five other books on the nature of the human mind and brain and their relationship to thought, health and individual and social consciousness, which have sold over ten million copies and been translated into 23 languages. Dr. Ornstein has taught at the University of California Medical Center and Stanford University, and he has lectured at more than 200 colleges and universities in the U.S. and overseas. He is the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK), an educational nonprofit dedicated to bringing important discoveries concerning human nature to the general public. Among his many honors and awards is the UNESCO award for Best Contribution to Psychology and the American Psychological Foundation Media Award 'for increasing the public understanding of psychology.'