In Celestial Koan’s opinion, we’ve shown some considerable competency at managing Planet Earth, which isn’t to say we haven’t made many mistakes, have a lot to learn, and are still learning.

Our problem is that we haven’t worked out how to manage one particularly troublesome and prevalent species: homo sapiens sapiens.

Almost every current problem we have with managing Planet Earth derives from the fact that (like pretty much every other life form) we breed to and beyond the limits of the resources available to support us.

In short - we are still behaving in accordance with our innate creature nature, not our intellectual intelligence.

And our innate creature nature includes selfishness, lust, envy, anger, pride, sloth, all forms of ism (tribalism, racism, agism, sexism, etc.) and aspirations for a better standard of life for ourselves and our progeny.

In the natural state most of these offspring die before ever reaching adulthood.

But with technology we have vastly reduced infant and child mortality rates, and found clever ways of increasing resource availability for humans, but at a cost to ecology, biosphere and global waste and pollution.

We are making progress on this. From contraception technology to education and restraint, we are reducing our tendency to mate at puberty and produce a dozen plus kids each.

And our technology is becoming more efficient.

But our desire for a better human standard of living, and living space, resulting in habitat destruction for other species, is still a huge problem.

And our fractious, tribal, and competitive nature continue to cause huge political turmoils that we haven’t come close to solving. So far we have progressed from tribes, to city states, to nations. We are trying to create super-nations, such as the USA, the EEC, the PRC, and India. Maybe we’ll eventually make the UN a global government. Will that solve our political problems? Probably not. The Soviet Union broke up. Catalonia wants to split from Spain. Yugoslavia broke up. Britain (or at least England) voted to leave the European collective.

So the answer is - if we can learn to manage ourselves as a species, then we will succeed in becoming excellent managers of Planet Earth as a whole.

Which means that the question really becomes a different and even more pointed question.

Will we (people) succeed in learning to manage ourselves as a species?

And that truly is the challenge. We have a long history of wars and man’s inhumanity towards man. History isn’t really on our side here, and World War 3, if it happens, could absolutely be the war to end all wars - permanently.

At present far, far, far too many people are still behaving in accordance with our innate animal nature (emotions) rather than our intellect. Every time you see racism, agism, sexism, nationalism, and partisanship (including political partisanship), it indicates how far we have yet to go before we can succeed in managing ourselves as a species. And we will not survive unless we learn to change that behaviour. So from Brexit, to Trumpism, to radical anything, to religions that maintain that contraception is a sin, we can consider them all to be features of human behaviour that indicate we are still following our feelings instead of our brains. These behaviours are clearly very very prevalent, and are still shaping our political landscapes. Not exactly grounds for optimism.

The jury is still out on this one.

Hope this answer helps.