Sigmund Freud once commented that it was always possible to unite groups of men as long as they had someone to unite against. This is especially true if that someone is Nature. Global warming may be the only event that can prevent our species from self-destructing.
Our planetary eco-system is presently engaged in a healing enterprise. Having been afflicted for several centuries with a virulent and rapidly proliferating parasite, its immune system has been activated. It is throwing us off. This will be very good for the planet, not so good for us.
Successful parasites are ones that come to some sort of accommodation with their host, so both can live. Unsuccessful ones kill their hosts, and thereby, themselves. If we are to keep at least a few of our descendants living on this planet we're going to have to re-connect with what we were originally wired for--what enabled us to survive for millions of years amid stronger and more efficient species--our ability to cooperate. That was before we made virtues out of belligerence and greed.
This will require some mental adaptation. Human beings have a funny habit of separating things with their minds (a useful tool, to be sure) and then freaking themselves out when they discover that nothing is, in reality, separate. To survive as a species we need minds capable of understanding both the necessity of making distinctions and the necessity of not taking them too seriously. Only minds capable of handling this paradox will survive the century.
The Bush administration is a prime example of the obsolescence of linear, static, dualistic thinking. It has no sense of process, only of fixed, black and white entities locked in eternal combat. Its refusal to hear any ideas besides its own archaic ones, its refusal to accept the reality of international interdependence, and its monumental rigidity, have had catastrophic results, but the administration continues to stick its collective head in the sand--playing at soldiers instead of taking care of business. In the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Wolfowitz bubble world, if you refuse to look at something, it will go away. And if you just keep pretending it's 1900, everything will turn out all right in the end.
Authoritarian systems are an anachronism, democracy is not. The nation-state is an anachronism; international bodies are not. Armies are an anachronism; international policing is not. All major problems today are international problems. To ignore this is to become a suicide bomber.