While people worldwide are well aware of the impacts of climate change, pollution and habitat loss – and know that there is a severe loss of species occurring – our leading experts and institutions are not seriously addressing the very real possibility of a mass extinction event of our making occurring within the next 30 to 100 years. Mass extinction means that the biosphere suffers such a huge loss of life forms on all levels that the web of interconnected biological systems breaks down, decimating our air, water and the entire chain of life that we and other species depend on for our existence. It is a sobering subject, but like other serious problems faced at this critical stage of human evolution, avoiding mass extinction will require radical shifts in how we live, and bold initiatives to address the whole system impacts of human civilization on the planetary body. Ulansey shares the story of launching the website massextinction.net (http://massextinction.net)in the 1990s, and the later formation of the Species Alliance (http://www.speciesalliance.org)non-profit, which recently released the film Call of Life (http://www.calloflife.org). A Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at UC Berkeley and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, his thoughtful observations about the human condition, the hypnotic effect of our consumer culture and the individual and mass denial that afflicts us, brings more than unsettling facts to this mind expanding conversation.