Our species is putting earth’s well-being at risk, writes Mary Pipher in The Green Boat, “not because we are cruel” but because “we are having a hard time slowing ourselves down and thinking things through.”

In this compassionate view of our human predicament, I find a paradox: to heal the planet, we must act wisely, decisively, and soon—and yet, to shift our understanding of what we are here for, we need time.

Pipher invites us to slow down and take time whenever we can—to hear ourselves think, to truly connect with each other, to savor the deep fulfillments of the present moment, and to be moved by the beauty all around us. In these ways, she shows, we gain a “well-developed moral imagination" in which "there is no ‘us’ and no ‘them.’ We are all us.”

This is not yet our usual human worldview. But as we slow down, as we keep talking with each other, it could be. It really could be, and sooner than we think.

The quotations above are from pages 179, 180, and 182 of Mary Pipher's The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture, published in paperback by Riverhead Books, June 2013.