Think GlobaL Act local - Focusing on the FOrest NOT tress .....

When the Voyager 1 probe was 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Carl Sagan made a request :

He asked NASA to turn it around to snap a quick photograph. 

The result was a faint image of Earth as a pale blue dot surrounded by the vastness of space. 

The late astronomer would then use this picture to share his reflections on what it meant and why it was important for us to capture.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines,

Every hunter and forager, Every hero and coward,
Every creator and destroyer of civilization,

Every king and peasant, Every young couple in love, 

Every mother and father, hopeful child,
Every inventor and explorer,
Every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician,
Every “superstar,” Every “Supreme Leader,”
Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – " on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this the pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

According to Claparède, feelings appoint a goal for behaviour, while intelligence merely provides the means (the "technique"). But there exists an awareness of ends as well as of means, and this continually modifies the goals of action. In so far as feeling directs behaviour by attributing a value to its ends, we must confine ourselves to saying that it supplies the energy necessary for action, while knowledge impresses a structure on it. Thus arises the solution proposed by the so-called Gestalt psychology: behaviour involves a "total field" embracing subject and objects, and the dynamics of this field constitutes feeling (Lewin), while its structure depends on perception, effector-functions, and intelligence.”
- Jean Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence

We do not merely absorb experience; we filter and select it - Robert J. Sternberg