-to-do civilized affluent communities who have repudiated the
acquisition and accumulation of material goods and services, turning,
instead to the satiation of body hungers and the freedom of social
irresponsibility.

Western man has spent ten centuries in building a civilization aimed at
economic stability and social security for the privileged. The "new
barbarian" progeny have rejected this civilization of affluence and are
busily engaged in fragmenting the social apparatus that has made
affluence possible. In a word, western civilization has organized and
coordinated, but in the process it has sowed the seeds of
disorganization and chaos.

One last word about the effect of western civilization on human society.
The West has littered and cluttered the planet with an immense variety
and with enormous quantities of gimmicks and gadgets from tin cans to
airplanes that fly faster than sound, and rockets that carry their
occupants to the moon. Western productivity has multiplied greatly. Too
often it has by-passed utility, ignored quality and outraged beauty.
More often than not its goods, services, institutions, practices and
ideas have remained at the surface without reaching down to life's
essentials.

If life can be fragmented into "physical," "mental," "emotional,"
"energetic," "spiritual," and "creative" it must be evident that the
western way has smothered life's more significant aspects under a
blanket of trivialities, non-essentials and inconsequentials.

Western civilization has stressed competition, aimed at the acquisition
and accumulation of material goods and services. The competitive
struggle, in its civilian and military aspects, has played fast and
loose with the contents of nature's storehouse.

Through uncounted ages Mother Nature has set up a knife-edge balance
among the multitude of aspects and differentiated forms that have
existed and still exist on the planet. Humanity has increasingly upset
this balance of nature, ignorantly and often stupidly, without pausing
to determine the resultant changes. Nowhere is this upset more in
evidence than the changes in climate and animal life and their
possibilities of survival brought about by the erosion of topsoil. Paul
Sears, in his _Deserts on the March_, has told the story. It can be
summed up in four words: deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, drifting
sands.

Another aspect of man's aggressions against nature is the wanton
destruction of wildlife--