A hundred years ago in 1910, Virginia Woolf, in her clairvoyant vision wrote, "Something changed in human nature." I sense she was referring to how the pulse and pace of life and relations between humans had altered due to the mind-altering and soul-numbing mechanisms of mass society. "Meaning has gone," she wrote in The Waves. "We settle down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of waddling to sea, hoping for a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy..."

Woolf used natural ciphers and observations of the natural world as receptacles of revelation and a larger warning for civilization. Having seen the vast melting ice sheet at the top of the world and the struggle of walruses and polar bears in the Arctic, one can only hope that the beings that inspired her will still be here by the end of this century. Forty years after landing on the moon, we have discovered water on the moon, but it is the waters of life here on Earth that need salvation.

In 1910, many were optimistic, believing that gadgets and machines promised a better future. Then World War I erupted and then World War II and then the bomb.

Next month at Copenhagen, as a world civilization, we will face the reality of climate upheaval. Great Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown said recently, perhaps without exaggeration, that climate change could be worse than both world wars and the Great Depression combined. But as someone versed in the metaphors of English literature, I sense his words as an alarm call, not just for the extinction of species, but also for the larger spirit of the human race. The Romantic poets wrote about nature's beauty and mysteries, and also the mystic world beyond the veil of what we perceive with our senses.

Today, it seems as if only the rude, arrogant and crushing world of economics and politics runs our lives and imaginations. "Nature and Nature's God" as was written into our very Declaration of Independence, feels like a quaint footnote in our lives. But it is the imperative of Nature, and how we respond with the best of human nature, that will determine the rest of time on this planet.

It is with great hope and concern that I look toward the end of this decade and into the next and pray that we finally understand the calling of this time. The crisis of this time is an evolutionary crisis the likes of which our ancestors have never faced. It is a mandate for being a custodian of Earth and for that which fosters life, for ecological salvation — to realize once again that there is a mystery on this Earth and that it is of an order that is fundamentally sacred.

The firmament that is being called upon us transcends ideology, politics or religion. It is of an order of magnitude that equals the time when our ancestors first started to walk upright, and we still do not. It is a calling to transcend the limitations of our unconscious humanity before it is too late. It is perhaps the basis of the Hopi understanding of the Fifth World and it is not about the end of the world, but about finally transcending the limitations of our species.

The next three years leading to 2012 are about reprioritizing our life on Earth. Life, not money, life, not the products we manufacture, has to become the basis for our place on Earth. The Fifth World is about shifting our axis of being in sympathetic resonance with the totality of existence. It is about a change in the soul that sees children as beings of promise rather than as entities who are sacrificed to the altar of economic disparity and ecological mayhem.

According to a Hopi/Diné elder who just died, we have less than a generation before we reach the point of no return. One hundred years after Virginia Woolf wrote her words, it is time for a change of monumental proportions in human nature once again; this time it needs to be transcendent.

What once seemed like abstractions, or far off predictions have become commonplace: mega droughts, floods, tsunamis, melting ice sheets and glaciers have all come true. The shift in the axis of Earth now under way needs a concomitant shift in the axis of our being, a paradigm shift bigger than the Agricultural Revolution. Witness the great drought in east Africa, one of the worst in memory, the altered monsoons in India, the amazing drought in eastern Australia, the forest fires in the American West. We have been given many warnings.

The next decade must become the turnaround decade. Childhood, forests, dreams, birdsong, existence itself it at stake. We will not be given a second chance.

Cyril Christo and his wife Marie Wilkinson have been documenting endangered ecosystems, tribes and species together since 1997. Their latest book is Walking Thunder: In the Footsteps of the African Elephant.