These essays are a selection from the set of challenges facing the urban First World. We all know that we are living on the shifting edge of an unsustainable reality, one that is completely subsidized by forces, people and places largely unknown and elsewhere. Here are essential observations and pressing questions on food security, big media, poverty, the social fabrics we must be able to quilt with... and intellectual tools to replace the keep-calm-and-go-shopping M.O. Kerry Coast is a journalist, dramatist and author of The Colonial Present: The rule of ignorance and the role of law in British Columbia.