Joe Paddock, in Dark Dreaming, Global Dimming, writes in apprehension of what he has come to call the Big Story. Panting along the trail of our private agendas, not so many of us care to hear this story. But its voice is insistent. It sounds now from the deep recesses of our minds. It sounds, too, as a sort of echo, from within almost everything we do. The Big Story, its plot beginning to move now at a truly rattling pace, is that our way of being here on planet Earth is reaching its limits, has brought us to an edge, to a point beyond which we had better not go.