"I'm working on an update of the long paper that describes my 'journey' to environmental awareness and activism. Rather than starting the revision at the beginning, I thought I'd start with what was most important -- the final section with the 'root cause analysis' and the 'solution map' that ultimately became my How to Save the World Roadmap. When I first published this paper on my blog, the charts that accompanied it generated more buzz than the paper itself. You can find them here and here. Since then, I've come to realize that these variables are less cause-and-effect than components of a self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating system. In Systems Thinking terminology, the 'virtuous circle' of life that existed in nature until about 30,000 years ago was 'disrupted' by events that upset the equilibrium and rippled through the system, producing a new self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating system that we call 'civilization'. Based on the research I've since done on population, violence, and on our political, economic and social systems, I've now updated the charts to show the circular nature and greater interrelationship of the 19 elements. The first chart shows how nature works as a self-managed, self-balancing planetary organism -- a map perhaps of what is called the Gaia Theory