Many people find themselves bereft, astonished at the callousness of their own species and 
by the strange inability of modern civilization to correct its dire course. For those who recognize the animate earth as the source of all sustenance, a future once anticipated with excitement now looms as the inchoate shadow stirring only a vague dread. The disquiet that troubles their sleep stems less from a clear premonition than from the lack of clear images, from the difficulty of glimpsing any way toward a livable world from the place where we are now, at the end -it would seem- of a particular dream of progress.

David Abram,
introduction to
Jean Giono,
Hill.