<DIV>What if the answer to our global political unrest and ecological collapse lies not only in the search for the new but in an exploration of the very old? Louis G. Herman argues that for us to create a sustainable, fulfilling future, we need to look back into our deep past. Important clues to recovering our core humanity can be found in the lives of traditional San Bushmen hunter-gatherers of South Africa. The San are the closest living relatives to that ancestral African population from which all humans descended, and their culture can give us profound insight into what life might have been like before walled cities, warfare, and slavery. For at least nine-tenths of the time we have been human we have lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, in small egalitarian communities in intimate relationship with wilderness. Herman doesn’t suggest that we go back to this way of life but that we draw from the wisdom of the San and other earth-based cultures in creating a new earth-centered politics. With compelling conviction he presents an archetypal model for ?resetting the compass of a confused humanity,” using both the newest science and the oldest aboriginal wisdom.</DIV>