The future of democracy and global governance depends on widespread public knowledge about local links to the world

The Persistence of Memory "When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented brains. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains."(Cosmos, Carl Sagan)