I have made several previous references to a thinker called Duane Elgin. Elgin first burst into the public eye in 1981 with his now-classic book Voluntary Simplicity, a book that helped to identify a new movement toward more simple and balanced ways of living. At the time he was working as a senior social scientist for the Stanford Research Institute, which gave him an unusual opportunity to observe and document emerging trends in society, and he used that work as the basis both for Voluntary Simplicity and for his 1991 book Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness.

Duane Elgin is being interviewed in a talk titled 'Breaking Point' where he responds to this question:
"Many of today's leading thinkers, futurists, scientists, and visionaries are warning us that the next twenty to thirty years will be a testing time for the human species, a time of evolutionary crisis that will entail great, and potentially even catastrophic, change. Could you please describe what you feel are the key factors precipitating this crisis? What will we be facing in the coming years?"