Initiatives that protect natural resources and improve social justice are being hatched all over the world, every day. Most of these initiatives are the products of grass-roots innovation. Micro-lending is a perfect example of how individuals are finding solutions and about 100 million people are improving their lives and their communities with small, profitable, targeted loans from micro-lending institutions, both public and private. Micro-lending was, of course, invented by a few individuals trying to help the poor.

At the peak of the boom in sport-utility vehicles, Honda and Toyota started building clean, efficient hybrid cars and they are only now catching up with the demand almost a million hybrid cars later, even with a 20-percent price premium on the hybrids. Now in business, it’s more expensive to manufacture too few units of a popular product than it is to manufacture too many. Honda, Toyota, Ford and the other automobile manufacturers have consistently underestimated the demand for their hybrid products and they haven’t been able to sufficiently curb the demand by overpricing the cars, either. I get tickled every time I think about the automobile marketers trying to figure out how big a premium they can put on clean technology – and then falling short.

Today’s consumer is happy to pay extra for food, cosmetics, clothing and just about anything else if he or she can be assured that the product was provided in a conscientious way. That’s how we bought and sold $60 billion worth of organics last year. I don’t know how we can fail to find this inspirational.

Biology has, of course, programmed us to reproduce as rapidly as possible and to consume everything useful in our path. We know we can’t keep living that way. Global warming is a serious problem, but it’s only a symptom of the larger underlying problem. We are overpopulating the planet. Unless you’re depending on some supernatural event to suspend biological reality, we’re on a path that ends in a catastrophe for Homo sapiens and most of the other species who currently live on the planet. Sooner or later, that’s where we end up.

No other living thing has ever, so far as we know, consciously limited its own expansion. We’re at least giving it some serious consideration.

We might consider this our ultimate spiritual exercise, the Great Riddle humanity has grappled with since we first tasted “the fruit of the tree of self knowledge,” if you will, and became self-aware.

The gospels of Christianity, Judaism and Islam all promise us “dominion” over nature. At least “dominion” is the word I picked up from the King James Bible in Sunday school. Might the translation just as easily have been “responsibility,” or “stewardship?” I haven’t bothered to brush up on my Biblical scholarship because I don’t think it matters. One goes with the other. If this planet is our prescribed domain, if we hold “dominion” over it, we obviously bear responsibility for it.

And, wondrously, we know it. We can conceptualize this: If we keep on being our natural selves, reproducing and defending our turf and consuming the natural resources laid before us, we’re going to face a catastrophic collapse of the systems on which we depend.

If you read only the major media our species still comes off as shortsighted and self-interested.

For example:

The Wall Street Journal’s recent feature on “When to Buy Organic,” answered its question purely on the grounds of various health threats from pesticides, heavy metals and persistent toxins. Worse yet, the writer gave the impression that although organics were originally part of a movement to protect the environment, the market is now maturing into health-related products. Implicitly, the story didn’t recognize any other reason to buy organic products. The story didn’t describe the environmental benefits of organic agriculture, even though the main reason that people buy organic is because it’s good for the environment. Whole Foods’ surveys bear this out. In fact, the major media consistently cover the boom in organic products as though it were driven by self-centered health nuts. Wrong. People care about the environment. Way over half the people who buy organic product say they do so primarily because it benefits the planet.

Vanity Fair’s green issue was the media’s most widely recognized environmental publication of 2006. Take that for what it’s worth. It’s a burr under my saddle, as you can probably imagine.

A recent BBC poll of adults worldwide contradicts what most national leaders around the world are saying these days. The poll indicated that in no country in the world do most people actually believe we’re in a “clash of civilizations.” The vast majority believes there is “no inherent incompatibility” between Islam and the West. Even in the Middle East, people see our international conflicts as political or economic in nature. They believe we will find common ground and end the violence. Egypt had the largest percentage who believed “violence is inevitable,” and they only made up 43 percent of the Egyptians surveyed.

And in the meantime, fair-trade products, locally produced food, organic clothing, and hybrid automobiles are all exploding in popularity – even though they are significantly more expensive than their mass-marketed alternatives - while the major media struggle to explain these trends in terms of frugality and self-interest. The popularity of the Prius took everyone by surprise, even Toyota, and it persists even when gas prices are falling. No one predicted the speed and scope of the expansion of Whole Foods, not even Whole Foods.

Who would have thought, a decade ago, that today 100 million people worldwide would be starting little businesses with money provided, for partially altruistic reasons, by micro-lenders? Certainly it’s not what the world’s giant banks expected.

People care, and they’re doing something about it. People are taking a personal interest in improving both their society and their planet.

Everybody knows the bad news: Conflicts between ideological, religious, tribal and political groups take innocent lives every day in nearly every nation across the planet. Wilderness and wildlife habitat are, on most continents, now limited to a few small parcels of land where our most photogenic species are preserved. That’s a shame. The oceans could be, in our lifetimes, fished out and our beautiful coral reefs are declining at unprecedented rates. Damn.

And, of course, Global warming threatens our very habitat.

Worse yet, our abuse of the planet is accelerating – so far.

So why do I feel proud of humanity? Why am I optimistic?

Because today, in the midst of so many pressing issues, I sense that we have started solving what may be, for our species or any species, the ultimate riddle. Millions of people are consciously making changes in their lives so that they will use less of the planet’s resources. That’s never happened before. This is the first time any living creature has confronted this problem.

Millions of people are taking it on by changing their buying habits. The Toyota Prius and other clean, fuel-efficient automobiles are selling so fast the manufacturers can’t keep up. Organic products are in every major supermarket, today, and huge mass-marketers like Wal-Mart are the largest distributors of organics, so it’s not an elitist phenomenon.

The richest man in China made his money selling solar panels. That’s right. Solar panels.