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What is a society if not all of its basic components, grouped together? As individuals, we are like cells to an organism. It follows that as individuals, we make a difference to how the organism functions. If you can believe that humans have the ability to affect the planet, then logically, you have to believe in the power of the individual.

Never underestimate the cell. Just one cell with a bad idea can kill a person if it isn't stopped in time. In fact, cancer is the leading cause of premature death in Canada (1) and the second leading cause of death in the United States (2). It is poised to become number one world-wide by 2010 (3). Cancer begins with a cell that mutates, eventually spreading these "bad ideas" in the form of genes, which trigger other cells to mutate until the person, the organism, the sum of all cells, dies. In goes without saying that when the body dies, the cells die, bad and good alike. In the society of the body, the individual makes a difference.

Of course, people are not cells. Whatever organism we comprise is likely as different from us as a cell is from the molecules that compose it. Nevertheless, many effective comparisons can be made. How would art have evolved over the centuries had not Brunelleschi successfully introduced perspective in painting? And to the extent that life imitates art, what might be different about people and how we create the world, if we had never seen images with depth, never explored that avenue? We know now that photography would have taken care of that a few hundred years later, but even that near-half millennium lag may have been in societal terms, like a cell in the visual cortex botching a critical period in its development and resulting in a blind eye.

Looking at more positive examples, think of the mutations which eventually gave us novel and at times useful traits, like our elegantly opposable thumbs, or blue eyes, now thought to have originated with a lone individual only several thousand years ago (4). In terms of people, we can see examples of brilliant scientists or artists who take the tools and ideas of their era and make out of them a totally new way of doing things or looking at the world, affecting many people over many generations.

It is hard for many to see our own impact as significant, because we have developed this idea that we are somehow separate from the hive, but what is the hive if not us? We are society, and if you believe that society can damage the planet, then it stands to

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