The story is told through the perspective of the following characters:
The development of these characters brings home the story's thesis: "a civilised society can ascent the desires of its members and halt its own expansion in favor of a symbiosis with its environment"
Each part in the trilogy fulfills a different function. Part one describes a society in conflict with its environment. A society that needs a hero to "save" it, while all problems are of its own devising and "saving" means a prologation of the problems. Powerful members of the society are desparatly clinging to their power and try to keep everything the same, while the society is in fact stuck in its own habits, unable to see the changes that are needed for true progress. Part two cracks open the image of a well functioning society to the reader. Revealing that everything that the reader thinks it knows is part of an intricate web of lies, designed to keep things as they are. At the end of part two the reader is confronted with a collapse of society as its members push for their own gains too hard, which leads to an environment unable to sustain the society they are part of. In part three a reset takes place and the reader initially finds itself in the pre-apocalyptic world of part one. However it turns out that this "restored world" is nothing but a thin wrapper around all the problems that surfaced in part two. It takes true heroship and personal sacrifice in part three to steer the society in a different direction even though not all people benefit from this change.