As Bodley writes, "If industrial man were to disappear overnight, he would leave an impoverished planet; but the extinction of man during the Paleolithic era would have been of no more global significance than the passing of the woolly mammoth." (Bodley p. 3) Man has made a great impact on the earth, and our passing would be the destruction of the entire planet, in all of its biological and cultural diversity.
We are faced with dilemma, the world resources being depleted, nations are warring, and individuals don't have much concern about such issues, rather they worry themselves with health, family, and value crises. They fail to see the scope of the complexity and importance of the problems we are facing, and Bodley writes to emphasize these concerns.
The world in a danger, there are a variety of higher or lower order of crises. Most dangerous of all is the threat of total annihilation with nuclear or radiological-chemical-biological warfare. These sorts of crises mean the end of the world as we know it, a destruction that would either eliminate us all, or change the world in a way that could never be forgotten. There are second order crises as well, that would be destruction but not the end, as in famine, ecological catastrophe, failure of economy, local wars, and a widening gap between the rich and poor. These crises are dangerous but not in the sort of way that first order crises have an impact. We still survive as a species if any of these localized crises occur. The third order of crises that Bodley is concerned with is the remote ones, such as the melting of the polar ice caps. People are concerned about what would happen If the polar ice caps were to melt, but that event is so far into the future that we would have plenty of time to deal with the situation by the time it occurs.
Bodley has a concern that we are slow to deal with crisis, and we make changes too late, often after the damage has already been done.