Our activities and self-understanding impact the entire globe. We are created co-creators, with deep responsibility for the future of nature that has given rise to us. Rooted in nature, we as created co-creator have a measure of freedom as well as constraint and responsibility. Both genetics and culture are inextricably part of us. Both myth and ritual, and the world of technology, are part and parcel of evolutionary processes.
Sin includes our alienation from nature.
Environmental policy entails issues of value, concerning human life and the larger matrix of the global ecosystem and other life forms, in the context of which we exist and act. The earth's carrying capacity for humans living in a hunter-gatherer culture is very much less than the current population. Values and morality grow out of our genetic and evolutionary roots. Conceptual diagram of biocultural evolution. In the Epilogue, Hefner summarizes his proposals and insights compactly and cogently.