“If the year 2018 brought us news from around the world that we were rock bottom, we were at the edge of a cliff, with climate change having a window of 12 years to change our track – away from fossil fuels, away from the toxic path of annihilation. Biodiversity extinction everywhere. In 50 years, with chemical agriculture we have driven 80& species to extinction. We don’t have to do that because we are living badly, we are getting sick, the earth is getting sick. Democracy is dying. Surveillance societies and police states are coming up to defend the rule of the 1%, and they are closing the future for our children. We are losing our humanity. As one humanity on one planet we can walk another path. The only way we should be walking on the Earth – with love, light-footed, reducing our ecological foot-print, increasing our hands-print, increasing our heart-print, increasing our true intelligence. Artificial intelligence is artificial by definition – just machine-learning. We, with all of life on Earth, have so many intelligences – compassionate intelligence, emotional intelligence, ecological intelligence. J.C. Bose and our physicists of a century ago had told us that the plants are alive and intelligent. Let’s wake up our intelligence with the rest of life and hand over to the children a beautiful, living, abundant, vibrant Earth. That’s the call for 2019. Let’s work together.” — Dr Vandana Shiva