There is only one known planet Earth with many living and nonliving communities depending on it for their existence. Humans are just a small fraction in a big network we call the web of life. This is home to amazingly diverse and mixed forms of life, shaping an ecological community we understand as the planet Earth. Like other members of this web of life, humans have certain responsibilities to contribute to the sustainable working conditions of these communities. But will Earth survive the pressures from human overpopulation, air and water pollution, and rapid deforestation of the dry land? This book will give the reader an understanding of what the future will look like under the continuation of current circumstances.

Brian Hedden defends a radical view about the relationship between rationality, personal identity, and time. On the standard view, personal identity over time plays a central role in thinking about rationality. This is because, on the standard view, there are rational norms for how a person's attitudes and actions at one time should fit with her attitudes and actions at other times, norms that apply within a person but not across persons. But these norms are problematic. They make what you rationally ought to believe or do depend on facts about your past that aren't part of your current perspective on the world, and they make rationality depend on controversial, murky metaphysical facts about what binds different instantaneous snapshots (or 'time-slices') into a single person extended in time. Hedden takes a different approach, treating the relationship between different time-slices of the same person as no different from the relationship between different people. For purposes of rational evaluation, a temporally extended person is akin to a group of people. The locus of rationality is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent. Taking an impersonal, time-slice-centric approach to rationality yields a unified approach to the rationality of beliefs, preferences, and actions where what rationality demands of you is solely determined by your evidence, with no special weight given to your past beliefs or actions.