The future of man on the planet Earth

Well I have to apologise because what I am going to talk about is not a very pleasant subject. The talk I am going to give you tonight has no literary value, no aesthetic value, no lyrical value. It is an intellectual interest - and it is just a very practical matter. We have talked about what is the future of man and that is what I am going to talk about: what I take our future to be.

I have to apologise because our future is somewhat depressing. I think our future looks at the moment very grim indeed. There are chances, but it looks very grim and that is what I am going to talk to you about. I think that we are actually at a crossroads. I think that possibly for the first time in the human experience, we must face the possibility of extinction of our species, and not in a matter of centuries but in a matter of decades, and I am not saying that lightly at all.

I have looked at these sorts of things for some time. I wrote a book with a colleague of mine called A Blueprint For Survival which was published in January 1972. It already said many of these things then, and it sold a lot of copies and helped start The Green Party. We have just completed another book called 5000 Days To Save The Planet [Imperilled Planet in the USA] which was released in France in September and has just been published in England too.

It is a big book - very highly illustrated - and this book says very much the same thing as we said 18 years ago, except that some of these issues have become mainstream issues now and the scientific community which was, on the whole, against us at the time, is now saying the same things as us on a number of these issues.

When I say they were against us at the time, in 1972, our book was counter-signed by a number of our leading scientists: Julian Huxley, C. H. Waddington and Sir Frank Fraser-Darling, a leading ecologist, and Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel laureate. Many of our leading ‘thinking' scientists of the time counter-signed our document - they agreed with it - at least with its basic ideas and the basic diagnostic solutions we proposed. But on the whole, the scientific community has not accepted all these things. Now they are beginning to accept them - in particular, two issues: the climate issue and the ozone layer issue.

We are threatened now by a whole number of problems. I might as well explain them before I talk about anything else. Undoubtedly, the most daunting is climate change. The planet is simply heating up. This has been known for a very long time. The actual mechanism involved in which the sun's rays are entering into the atmosphere but are being trapped by carbon dioxide, which is being emitted by us every time we burn anything, is well known. These greenhouse gases are turning our atmosphere into something resembling a greenhouse.

Fifty percent of the effect is caused by carbon dioxide, from burning fossils fuels, but there are other gases as well. There are CFCs which destroy the ozone layer and are very powerful greenhouse gases. CFCs are 15,000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide and they have a residence time in the atmosphere of about 100 or 150 years. Nitrogen oxide, much of which comes from artificial fertilizer, is also a very powerful greenhouse gases, and it stays in the atmosphere for a very long time. The same is true for methane gas, which we are generating as a result of rice cultivation and cattle production, mainly, but from other things as well.

This a very serious issue and it is a well-known issue. The mechanism was pointed out in 1875 or 1895 by a Swedish scientist called Arhenius. In 1957, it was pointed out again at the Woods Hole research establishment in Massachusetts, and it was pointed out again in the late 1960s, by a big study on man's impact on the climate being conducted at MIT. So it is an issue which has been generally known about for a very long time.

In our book A Blueprint For Survival, published 18 years ago, we described the mechanism and predicted exactly the rate at which all the devastation would happen. We could not calculate these things precisely - I am quite innumerate - but by using the best available information at the time, we were able to establish the rate of devastation. I am afraid to say that our politicians and international agencies chose to ignore the findings, because the information, did not serve to rationalise their policies. It made nonsense of their policy to increase energy consumption, which is precisely what we are still doing today.

Under Mrs Thatcher, our government is spending £13 billion on building more roads and the Channel Tunnel is due to come into operation, which is the biggest transport development of all time. In 1992, we are going to generate a massive market, when the whole of Europe becomes one market, the only objective of that is to further increase our industrialization and energy consumption, and Eastern Europe is entering into that market too. On top of this, the CIA recently said that Russia needs 85 million new motor cars and the Chinese say they want every single person in their country to have a refrigerator.

So you see, we are moving in the direction of increased energy use, whereas we should be moving in the opposite direction, and not, I might add, moving eventually in the operation direction, we should we moving in the opposite direction, right away. There have been many reports on this subject. They seem to be published with incredible regularity. There have been at least a dozen of them.

The last one, and the most authoritative, so we are told, is the report by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC), which was divided up into 3 panels, who were appointed by the United Nations to look at the climate question. The first two were scientific panels, and the third panel was a political one. The scientific panel declared that we have to cut down emissions of carbon dioxide by 60 percent, nitrogen oxide by 80 percent and CFCs by 80 percent, now - not in 20 years - now - if we want to avoid a climatic catastrophe. That is what the IPCC have said.

Now of course, Mrs Thatcher, you may remember, was very moved by this argument and a couple of years ago, she said that climate was the most important problem we had to face, but significantly, she never mentioned it or the issue of the environment at the Conservative Party Conference, which ended a couple of weeks ago. She never mentioned it, and you might ask why.

I don't know the answer, I can only guess. I assume that she suddenly realised what the implications were. How do you do anything about it? What do you do about it? The implications are pretty worrying. It is a very difficult problem to solve. It means changing the direction in which our society is moving. How do you cut down energy consumption?

Of course, you can achieve an awful lot without having to change our way of life. You can increase energy efficiency, massively, massively. You can possibly cut down on energy production and energy use by 40 to 50 percent. Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute in the United States knows possibly more about this than anyone in the world. He has been studying this subject for decades and he will explain how lightbulbs can be produced which use 5 percent of the electricity used by lightbulbs today, and how motor cars can be produced that travel 80 miles on 1 gallon on petrol. There is an incredible amount of saving that is possible. But even that, our government won't consider.

You can in fact save an enormous amount of energy. But even if you do save an enormous amount, you will still find that we have to go beyond 40 to 50 percent because it is not sufficient. We have to achieve a 60 to 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, and that means simply using less energy. It means really having less motor cars, less refrigerators and less of all the things that we are supposed to have more of. That is what it means. I have said that we are at a crossroads because we are. We are probably at the end of an era. This is a new era dawning in front of us, in which things are going to be very different to the world that we have known up until now.

I have only mentioned one problem which is climate. It is a very daunting one. But the other problem that is occurring and which is equally worrying, although much easier to solve, is the problem of CFCs. We are producing a whole lot of gases which are eroding the ozone layer. The ozone layer protects us from ultraviolet radiation from the sun and from space. This ultraviolet radiation has a very unpleasant effect on us. In fact, it has an extremely unpleasant effect.

An official report has just been published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which features establishment figures as opposed to the figures we have been using until now. This very conservative, international body, suddenly published the report last year, and told us that if we continue to destroy the ozone layer, as we are currently doing, we shall continue to increase the amount of ultraviolet radiation which reaches the Earth.

We know that there is a hole over Antarctica which is the size of the United States of America, where there is no ozone protection of any kind. There is also a general thinning elsewhere, and every time the thinning is reduced by 1 percent, ultraviolet radiation increases by about 2 percent. In New Zealand, the ozone layer has been reduced significantly. Ultraviolet radiation has increased by more than 8 percent in certain areas. Experts are now talking about increases of 20 percent.

When you are talking about increases of this size, the problem of the ozone layer becomes very, very worrying indeed. What is particularly worrying is that we have already released enough of these gases into the atmosphere (it takes a long time for the gases to go up), so that the gases shall cause a lot more damage - a lot more damage. Even if we ceased producing these gases, we are going to see a further increase in ultraviolet radiation.

According to the UNEP Report, ultraviolet radiation causes skin cancer. There is already a high level of skin cancer in Australia, New Zealand, and in countries which are now exposed, and this situation is going to become very much worse. We are talking about millions of extra cases of cancer, and quite a large increase in melanomas, which are the nasty skin cancers. Worse than that, if your exposed to sufficient amounts of ultraviolet radiation, your immune system breaks down, and we shall all end up like AIDS victims. So there will be a massive increase in diseases, because we shall no longer have a robust immune system to protect us against the threat.

Worse still, according to UNEP, we have reached the situation in which we cannot use inoculation. If you inoculate someone against polio, he shall acquire polio; if you vaccinate him against smallpox, he shall acquire smallpox. So you can see what this is doing to our health. It is too abominable to contemplate.

Furthermore, ultraviolet radiation has a very serious affect on food production because an awful lot of crops are sensitive to it, as are the phytoplankton, right at the bottom of the sea. They are the most important thing in the seas. If you kill off the phytoplankton, the whole of the food chain breaks down, because they are what provides grass on the land. The krill eat the phytoplankton, and other things eat the krill. They are the basis of the marine food chain.

Now we continue to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will be not be very nice. It will have a serious and further affect on the greenhouse, because the seas absorb a very vast amount of the carbon dioxide which we put up into the atmosphere. The seas seem to be capable of absorbing these gases in enormous amounts, although we do not know why. It appears to be largely due to the action of the phytoplankton, which we know are capable of photosynthesis. The phytoplankton act like plants - as algae. So if we kill off the phytoplankton, the sea will cease to be a satisfactory sink for the carbon dioxide we are releasing today, and this will trigger off further changes, in particular, further global heating.

So with regards to global warming, we are not doing anything about it. All that our governments have suggested so far, is to freeze emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at current levels, by the year 2000, but this is totally inadequate since our scientists have asked us to dramatically reduce the levels, not just freeze them.

Equally, with regards to the ozone layer, we have exactly the same problem. We have something called The Montreal Protocol. It was signed in Montreal, 2 or 3 years ago, and it is very very weak indeed, and hence, totally, totally insufficient. There was a recent ozone meeting in the UK, only a few weeks ago, where again, parties took very weak decisions. The main companies that produce the ozone depleting gases are the biggest producer, Du Pont in America (which produces about 33 percent of these ozone depleting gases), and ICI in England which produces about 8 percent. There are also a whole lot of other smaller companies. They suggest replacing CFCs with something different called HFCs.

The HFCs do not deplete the ozone layer as dramatically as CFCs. There would be a 90 percent improvement if HFCs were universally adopted, BUT, HFCs remain extremely powerful greenhouse gases, just as powerful as the CFCs. Significantly, no one was allowed to talk about the greenhouse at the meeting on ozone. They wanted to keep the two subjects apart, so no one could object to present plans by ICI and Du Pont. During these meetings, ICI and Du Pont have been strenuously lobbying, to prevent governments from taking the necessary decisions and taking the necessary actions. I personally regard this behaviour on the part of these chemical companies as criminally irresponsible. They are only interested in their own interests - they are not making any efforts whatsoever, really.

They should say: "We are responsible for this. We have been totally irresponsible by releasing all these gases into the atmosphere, just make money, which is now going to give skin cancer to millions of people." That is actually what is going to happen. They are going to cause the most terrible problems. They should be on their knees apologising. Instead, they are lobbying to be allowed to put more gases into the atmosphere, which is totally and utterly unacceptable. The public should take a stand against this. They should realise that this is not acceptable. It should not be accepted under any circumstances. Exactly the same problem is happening with the greenhouse effect.

The Coal Board recently invited a group of crooked scientists who belong to The George Marshall Institute (which used to do work for President Reagan) to try and persuade people, by producing totally bogus scientific arguments, to support Star Wars. These scientists are simply crooks who just work for whoever is going to pay them.

These scientists came to the UK and told us all that there was no connection whatsoever between the warming that has been observed and carbon dioxide emissions. They claim that the warming that we have noticed (the actual temperature in the atmosphere has increased on average by something like 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial age) can be attributed entirely to increased solar activity. They were laughed out of court because they have completely gone against the present opinion of climatologists. In fact, British Coal has been seriously criticised for inviting them here.

This is the sort of lobbying activity that should not be tolerated. Of course, the oil companies are doing the same thing in America and Mr Bush has refused to admit that there is any connection. He has refused to agree to any undertaking of any kind to do anything whatsoever about global warming. I would like to emphasise that the reason why I keep on referring to global warming is because it is quite clearly the most serious problem we face today.

However, even if we did not face the threat of global warming, and even if we did not face the problem ozone layer depletion, we are still destroying this planet very quickly. We are still making it uninhabitable. Consider the rate at which we are destroying forests. We are destroying around 20 million hectares of forests per year, according to official figures, not figures produced by environmentalists. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations was quoting deforestation figures of 6 million hectares per year, but they now admit the scale of deforestation is at least 3 times worse than they had previously thought. We are destroying 20 million hectares of forests every single year. Britain is about 56 million acres. An area of forests, nearly half the size of Britain is being destroyed, every year.

You can realize yourself that it is the speed at which we are doing it which is so completely terrifying. If you wandered around Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, 50 years ago, these countries were largely forested, with about 70-80 percent of the countries covered in forest. Today there is very little left of the forests in the Philippines - very, very little. In Indonesia, the forests are disappearing quickly. In the peninsula of Malaysia, there are practically none left.

The forests which remain are in very inaccessible areas, and the deforestation is now taking places in places such as Sarawak and Sabar. Within 6 years there will be nothing left because the reaction of the Malyasian Government to the environmental pressure which is building up to try and stop the destruction of forests, is to buy a lot of search lights and to cut the forests down at night as well as in the daytime. The government of Malyasia is now deforesting Malyasia's forest cover, 24 hours per day. Within 6 years, there will be no forests left. that is the reaction of the Malyasian Government to the problem of deforestation.

There is a whole group of Malay scientists and other experts who lie about the state of the forests by issuing governmental propaganda. These experts have been invited to Paris. I have just returned from Paris today. 50 of the main French photographers, have all be invited on a great tour to Malaysia to see how environmentally conscious the Government of Malyasia is, and to observe the efforts being made by the Malyasian Government on behalf of the native peoples who are being wiped out, along with their forests, by the Government. So you can see what we are up against. That is why the problem is very difficult and that is why at the moment, I am fairly pessimistic about these issues.

First of all, forest destruction leads has a terrible effect on climate. The plankton in the sea absorb carbon dioxide, and the forests also absorb carbon dioxide. In fact, forests are the main absorbers of carbon dioxide. If you cut the forests down and burn them, you are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Approximately 700 billion tonnes of carbon are locked up in the world's forest. The figure is quite colossal. If you cut down all the world's forests and burn them, the problems which result just become colossal. It is now believed that forest destruction contributes between 10 percent and 25 percent of the greenhouse gases which cause global warming, in particular by forests burning in Amazonia and elsewhere.

So the problems of climate change, ozone depletion and forest destruction are all very closely linked. If you want to introduce a programme which will bring about a campaign to really try and bring global warming to an end, which is what you have to do if you want to survive, you will have to have a massive tree planting campaign worldwide. This would require the planting of enormous areas of land with trees. Mass reforestation would be absolutely indispensable. It is an essential part of a realistic campaign of action to avert global warming.

However, it is not just on this global climatic level that forests are critical. Traditional tribal people from India and elsewhere, derive everything from the forests. In India, the people who live in or near forests, obtain from their forests, not only their fuels and their building materials, but the building materials used for their traditional artefacts and traditional Ayurvurdic medicines. This encapsulates some 3000 to 4000 different herbs from plants, half of which have already been made extinct because of the forest destruction. The dyes they use for all those wonderful clothes, and all their wonderful artefacts, also come from the forests.

When you destroy the forests, you are destroying the culture of the Indian continent. In fact when you destroy the forests, you are destroying the cultures of all the incredibly diverse ethnic groups, that have inhabited some of the most beautiful countries in the world. When you destroy the forests, these people are just simply turned into slum dwellers.

Apart from that, destroying the forest leads to very serious problems with the water table. The water table can go up in certain cases, but usually, the water table goes down, and then it collapses. When the water table goes down, the streams dry up, the wells dry up and the rivers dry up - because torrents only flow during the rainy season. Then the soil blows away and everything goes with it - all possibility of food cultivation. You then face an absolutely disastrous situation.

In fact, those who perpetuate this destruction realise that. We systematically lied to by our institutions such as the Overseas Development Agency, by all the international agencies and by the governments. That is one of the problems. We are lied to systematically, by all these groups. They tell us that it is the peasants who are cutting down the forests. But if you really want to know the truth and if you ask the peasants, the reality is very different.

Often peasants do cut down forests but then you must ask, why are the peasants in those forests in the first place? Why should they have to cut down forests? The answer is, nearly always, that we have taken away their original native lands. For instance, the people who are destroying the forests in Rondonia in Amazonia where the forests have largely disappeared, are peasants who came from the State in Brazil called Rio Grande do Sul, in the southern part of Brazil, and whose lands have been away from them, to accommodate vast soya bean plantations.

Brazil has now become one of the biggest soya bean exporters in the world (either first or second in the world market). To achieve this, the people who lived in Rio Grande do Sul, had to be pushed out, and they were sent up to Rondonia. Equally, in many areas in India, villagers are cutting down their forests. Why are they cutting down forests? The reason is that the impact of their activities is now too great on the forests that have already been devastated by commercial loggers.

Forests are destroyed for a host of other reasons. They are destroyed by large dam building projects. In Brazil, there is a programme to build 75 large dams in Amazonia. Each time a dam is built, a reservoir has to be constructed behind the dam, which can be 2,000 to 3,000 square kilometres in size. Just imagine it. As far as I know, the biggest reservoir is behind the Volta Dam in Ghana, where an artificial lake was constructed behind the dam - and that lake takes up 5 percent of the total surface of the country. It's 8,000 square miles. So it is very easy to see that mega-engineering projects such as the construction of large dams, necessarily destroy forests. The World Bank is now financing the construction of huge highways through Amazonia. As soon as the highways are built, the entire area becomes accessible and vulnerable to even more forest destruction.

What is particularly bad is that all of our governments are lying about this. As well lying, the actions plans which they develop to try and solve these problems are not only wrong but fraudulent. The United Nations responded to the whole problem of forest destruction was to produce a report called the Tropical Forestry Action Plan (known as TFAP). The TFAP is supposed to save the forests but it is a fraud and Mrs Thatcher gave the United Nations, £100 million of tax payers money.

TFAP is not designed to stop the destruction of forests, it is a development plan to make a lot of money for a lot of people, and hence the TFAP involves ordinary commercial forestry. The TFAP involves planting eucalyptus plantations, pine plantations, such as those that we have in in Scotland, and if necessary, cutting down, natural forests, in order to make more room for these vile plantations which they are planting.

We at The Ecologist have attacked this activity for a very long time. My colleagues and I have been awarded some money from a Finnish agency to research the problem and to produce a document which discredits these activities. My colleagues, and the other people working on this issue, have obtained the 9 national Forest Action Plans, bring followed, which describe the activities being conducted by the countries, within the framework of the Tropical Forest Action Plan.

If you read the Action Plans, you will see that in the case of every single one of these countries, the implementation of these Plans has lead to a massive acceleration in forest destruction. So now we have put them all in confusion, and they have had to write reports to say that the TFAP does not work after all, so much so that the World Bank has distanced itself from it - fortunately. We have convinced the World Bank to stop financing the Tropical Forestry Action Plan, and there is cause for some optimism.

The man responsible for thee TFAP, Mr Salmar, the Head of the Food & Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, is a gangster, and I am not using the term lightly. If the term could be applicable to anybody, it could be applicable to him - he is a gangster. He is operating the TFAP, and he is promoting the Plan because it brings in $8 billion. That is how much money the FAO have asked for. Salmar badly needs the money because the Americans are cutting off funds at the moment, after they realized he is a gangster. They do not like him because he doesn't publish any accounts.

In particular, he does not publish any accounts for the "Technical Co-operation Programme", which is his slush fund. He receives $60 million per year which enables him to be re-elected every year, in spite of the fact that everybody is trying to dispose of him. So he is still operating this Plan, and he refuses to reform it, but he is being isolated, and hence things are looking good in that direction. The World Bank is breaking away from him and his TFAP, and even the World Resource Institute, which is an environmental body, wholly linked with these institutions, is breaking away from the TFAP, which they started in the first place. There is reason for hope, in that the Plan is being abandoned. On the other hand, it is not for that reason that the forests are being saved.

Some activities are happening which are slightly encouraging. First of all, the most radical environmentalist in Brazil, José Lutzenburger, is an astonishing man. I always wonder why they have not shot him yet, because they shoot most people there who do these sort of things. The widow of Chico Mendez (who was shot for opposing the destruction of forests) actually went to a meeting and they all drank to her health, and praised her - "you are the widow of the great fighter Chico Mendes" - and she said "I am not, I'm one of 437 widows of great fighters" - well it may have been less, but it was a big figure!

So it's not a very safe place, but they haven't killed him yet. In fact he has become Minister of the Environment. But the new president, Mr Collor, who is about 40 years old (or may be even less), is know so far as a rich playboy. When he came to power, no one ever thought for moment that he would become so involved. He suddenly showed an incredible interest in the whole problem of forest destruction. It may well be that his principle preoccupation is to stop this destruction. He has adopted José Lutzenburger as his Minister of the Environment - a sort of Personal Assistant - and the two of them are flying everywhere, both trying to do take action to save the forests. What has happened is quite astonishing. In fact, it is a miracle.

That is why I have hope, because miracles do happen. It is a miracle that Mr Collor - a very right wing, rich playboy, should suddenly become a hero of the environmental movement and that he should commission José Lutzenburger to be his Minister of the Environment! It is totally miraculous! It's a wonderul miracle and we need miracles of this sort! So despite the devastation, there is a glimmer of hope on the forest front.

I won't continue with this catalogue of destruction, because you will all become frightfully depressed. But let me mention the problem of land. If you look at the destruction of our arable land, the scale of the problem is equally as bad as that associated with global warming, ozone depletion and forest destruction.

Every year, we are losing an area of agricultural land equivalent in size to the area of forests being destroyed. An area of land about half the size of Britain is being eroded, desertified, salinised, or waterlogged, but really, destroyed, every year. Worse still, everything associated with land is moving in this destructive direction. Modern agriculture happens to be very destructive. The massive machines used by the agricultural industry, destroy the topsoil by compacting it very dramatically. The fertilizers and pesticides which we use on the land, have a terrible effect on its health. We try to obtain much more out of the soil than the soil is capable of producing, and consequently, the soil is disappearing at a rate of knots.

According to official papers produced by the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC, who produce some of the best data on this subject, we are losing 26 billion tonnes of top soil each year. It is just disappearing. America is losing about 4 billion tonnes, and the situation in Russia and China is very, very bad also. The land is just disappearing. Worldwide it is rapidly being built on and cemented over, as we in the UK have enjoyed doing for a very long time.

Since it started developing 10 or 15 years ago, China has already lost a considerable proportion of its arable land - a colossal figure of around 5 to 10 percent - because it has been cemented over! In order to develop, the land has to be covered with cement! It has already happened in this country. There was a Committee set up under a very well known geographer, Sir Dudley Stamp, in the 1930s, which was very much connected with this issue. They set up a bureaucracy, and then in 1977, Alice Coleman, a geographer at London University, produced the Second Land Utilisation Survey, showing that the problem had become much worse, and it is becoming worse and worse, all the time.

At the time, Alice Coleman actually declared, that if we continued in the current direction, then by the year 2157, there would be practically no agricultural land left in England anymore. Most of it would have been built on, or so divided between housing estates, roads, rubbish dumps, golf courses and everything else, that it would be unusable. Since then, other people have attacked Coleman, but I am certain that she still maintains her position. You can see yourself, the rate at which we are destroying our agricultural land. The Channel Tunnel, which is being built through Kent is absolutely horrific. The land is being destroyed everywhere and it is basically being destroyed because of the process of modernization.

Last year, I travelled to India and was involved in the making of a film entitled Edward Goldsmith: The Green Revolutionary [in the Fragile Earth series]. I narrated and presented the film, which was produced by Nicholas Claxton. We travelled around India, to Sri Lanka, and various places, where I questioned farmers.

The Green Revolution is ‘our' ‘solution' to the world food problem. It was developed and launched in the late 1960's, and early 1970's by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (of Mr Salmar fame). If you look at that Green Revolution, it involves massively, massively modernizing agriculture. It is heralded as a tremendous success, but in fact, it has been a total calamity.

I questioned farmers in Haryana, which is one of the two areas where the Green Revolution was applied. The Green Revolution only seems to work in areas where the soil is fairly robust and where it is not too hot. The Tropics are not ideal, but these places, such as the Punjab, are reasonably cool. The farmers told me that in these areas, among other things, the soil has disappeared. We filmed this, but unfortunately it was cut out of the final documentary.

I spent some time with rich and successful farmer, who said that his ancestors had been working the land which he was showing me, for the last 2000 years, but that in 20 years, he had completely destroyed it. He told us that now, without fertilizer, his land will only produce weeds. It will not produce anything because the soil is dead. The Green Revolution killed it. Make no mistake - the soil is dead, all over the world.

In America, it is dead, except the destruction of the soil has been masked, by the application of more and more fertilizer, every year. Of course, fertilizer costs an awful lot of money. The price of fertilizer has gone up, and as such, it has become less and less economic to use it. Initially, these farmers began making a lot of money. The gentleman I was talking to, had achieved a lot. He owned a tyre factory and he owned real estate in Delhi, where real estate is more expensive than almost anywhere else. But now he says, "I'm going bust!", because he is compelled to have to buy more and more fertilizer and pesticide than ever before, and the machinery needed for industrial agricultural is much more expensive than traditional machinery. He also has to pay for irrigation water which is becoming more and more expensive all the time.

So the destruction of the land is taking place on a horrific scale, with the total dishonesty on the part of the people who are supposed to be solving the problem. The Green Revolution is not designed to deal with destruction of the land. It is meant to be preventing the destruction of the land and trying to feed people, but it is failing, because famine is something which has become chronic.

Possibly for the first time in the history of man, we are witnessing famine on a continental level. It used to occur in limited areas - there was famine in Bihar and people were enjoying themselves next door in Calcutta or Bengal, or vice-versa. Now there is suddenly famine on a continental scale. Africa is now suffering generally from chronic famine, every single year.

This is largely because we are exporting their food and much of the good land is used for exports. You cannot eat your food if you export it. You have to decide between eating it or exporting it - you cannot do both. In order to export it, you have to make the food competitive on the international market, which means that you have to use modern methods and modern methods destroy the land. As soon as you start using these modern methods, you displace the people from the land - and this creates more problems than it solves.

There are 800 million people in India and 600 million of them live on the land. If you were to adopt in India, the modern Western methods of food production, and embrace the type of agriculture policy espoused by the British, where you have 3 percent of the population feeding the rest of the population, all you will need is 24 million people to feed the entire population of the Indian sub-continent. So you the remaining 776 million are compost - because I do not know what else you can do with them, once you have pushed them off their lands.

You cannot find jobs for them. There is not much room in the cities. They can of course attempt to live in the slums - which are mushrooming in all the major cities in India. Incidentally, these kinds of slums will eventually absorb a very large proportion of humanity. You cannot find jobs for the billions of people that are being displaced, because there is already massive unemployment. The economic growth required to absorb the world's unemployment, is just completely unthinkable.

We are talking about a rate of economic growth of 10 percent, 15 percent or 18 percent. The United Nations' International Labour Organization (ILO) report on the subject which I reviewed several years ago, said exactly that. So these people simply cannot be absorbed. There is simply no way that it can be achieved. In reality, what is actually happening, is that we are making the planet uninhabitable. We are changing its climate, removing the ozone layer which protects us against ultraviolet radiation, cutting down and destroying our forests, wiping out our rivers and our groundwaters destroying the arable land and much more.

I could also talk about chemicalization of the biosphere, but you have probably heard enough. It is not a coincidence that we are experiencing a general contamination of seas, rivers, groundwaters and sewers. We produce so many toxic chemicals in the UK that we just do not know where to dispose of them. The West exports approximately 20 million tonnes to the Third World. The West dumps these toxic chemicals virtually anywhere within the Third World countries that they can.

What is most depressing is that Western governments do not care one iota about the consequences. The industrialists do not give a damn either, and the international agencies which are meant to be solving the problems we are creating, are, instead of solving the problems, creating the problems. The problems which result from chemical dumping are largely due to the actions of international agencies and governments, because they are only interested to staying in power - just like everybody else.

Industrialists want to make money, politicians want to stay in power, and international agencies want to stay in power. To stay in power, you need to please large corporations. The United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), just like the Ministry of Agriculture, Food & Fisheries (MAFF) in the UK, is largely working for the agro-chemical industry. That is exactly what they are doing - they are not trying to feed the world at all.

That is the situation we are in today. What do we have opposing these vial forces? Who is trying to solve these crises? There are a few environmental groups: Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, World Wide Fund For Nature etc, and a lot of young people, who are doing a lot of wonderful work. Unfortunately, I am afraid that the odds are stacked against them. Nevertheless, the revolt is happening all the same, and it is an encouraging sign. There is other activism such as José Lutzenburger's involvement in Brazil.

A particularly encouraging sign is that in the last year, the public has suddenly caught on to all the devastation. There has suddenly been a veritable explosion in human consciousness, and in environmental consciousness. People are now very much more aware than they have ever been, and there is a chance that public opinion will really build up, so that the politicians and industrialists will be brought back under social control, which is in fact, what has to be done, because now, they do whatever they choose.

There is no control - the politicians and industrialists of today do whatever they want. Governments and industrial corporations are self-serving organizations, but that is no longer tolerable. We have to bring them back under social control. But if sufficient pressure is not generated, then there is no hope, and when i say there will be no hope, I mean it.

Let us be clear - there is no question about it - our planet is heating up, and you do not have to heat it up very much to make it uninhabitable. I was recently reading Ambio (the environmental magazine produced by the Swedish Academy Of Sciences), in which England is described, 130,000 years ago. At that time, in this area, which is now London, there were huge marshes, inhabited by crocodiles and hippopotami; the sea-level was 6 metres higher than it is today, and the temperature was only 3 degrees higher than now.

Unfortunately, we are once again moving towards a temperature increase of 3 degrees, and most predictions such as those produced by the IPCC, tell us that by the year 2025, the United Kingdom shall be about 2 degrees warmer than it is today. That is a serious temperature increase. A rise of 3 or 4 degrees by the year 2050 is also anticipated, although the scientists admit that the models on which they base these predictions, are extremely rudimentary.

They do not know how to model different types of cloud cover or how to model the effect of the oceans. The oceans may go on absorbing CO2 or they may not. The oceans may suddenly be saturated with CO2, or they may start emitting CO2 - in which case the planet experience a massive climate flip. The scientists do not know how to model all of the possible feedback loops, and they admit this. They are fully aware that if we destroy all the plankton in the sea with ultraviolet radiation, or if we simply make it too hot for the plankton to exist (they like a cool environment), then the seas will not be able to absorb any more carbon dioxide. What will happen then?

Wooof! The hotter atmospheric temperature will make the boiling oceans even hotter still. That will kill off more plankton, which will make the climate even hotter, which will in turn, kill off more plankton, which will make the climate hotter still. It is a chain reaction and the same negative feedback mechanism occurs when the planet's soil is heated up.

There are enormous amounts of carbon locked up in the soil. If you heat up the Earth sufficiently, some of this carbon shall be released and emitted into the atmosphere. If you cut down the forests, even more carbon is emitted. There are all sorts of mechanisms which can trigger off these chain reactions, that then bring about much more rapid climate changes, than we would like to believe.

So we are making the planet uninhabitable and I am talking about decades, so you are actually faced with the possible extinction of our species, and I would even say probable extinction of our species, within the next few decades, unless something very drastic is done about it immediately.

I would like to conclude by talking about what action should be taken to avert the planetary crisis. First of all, why are we involved in so much planetary destruction? My explanation is that the structure of our society is totally wrong - totally wrong. If you look at the sort of societies that we have lived in up until now, they were largely family based. We lived in families, which themselves, were part of communities. These were Vernacular communities, or to use the wonderful term gemeinschaft (as opposed to gesellschaft). They were communities which were geared to the achievement of all sorts of different ends - not just economic ends, but religious, spiritual, social, communal and aesthetic ends - and this was possible because their economics was under control.

I do not know if any of you have read the words of the very remarkable economic historian Karl Polanyi, but in the 1930s and 1940s, he produced a book which pointed out that the Homo economicus does not exist in the traditional world. He noted that in the traditional world, economic activities are embedded in social relations - that is the term he used. He saw that people did not distribute food or artefacts in order to maximise the return on any factor of production. Instead, they distributed food and artefacts in order to satisfy kinship obligations and in order to obtain social prestige, such as by giving feasts.

So, the economic activities of traditional peoples, were under control. They were subordinated to other, much more important ends. that is no longer the case. what has happened is that the community has gone, the family has gone and the culture that went with it has gone. We have created a totally atomised society - a disintegrated society which people take to be normality. Mrs Thatcher said the other day, that society means no more than the number of the people that happened to inhabit a particular area. There was no such thing as the family or society. You see, she has no idea about what societies were like in traditional society.

Under these conditions, when people are atomised and when society is atomised, what happens? The answer is that people re-organize themselves into completely new types of social structures, if you can call them that. These new social structures in effect, economic structures, or as the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies [author of Gemeinshaft und Gesellschaft (1920)] calls them, gesellschafts (as opposed to gemeinschafts). These new organizations (corporations and institutions) are geared specifically to economic ends - that is the single purpose of these organizations.

ICI exists to make profits so it can continue to survive so it can continue to make profits. It does not matter in the slightest if ICI poisons the whole country. It does not matter whatsoever if ICI destroys everything and in doing so, changes the climate. That is not part of their business! They are not asked to worry about morality or climate or ecology! They have to be competitive, because if they are not competitive, they will go out of business. Mr Dupont will put them out of business.

That is the society that we are in. That is the society that we have created. It is not that they are particularly evil - that is what they are told to do and that is how they have to be. If you are going to be a Chairman of that company and you want to stay in office and you want the company to stay in business, then that is what you have to do. If you do not do it, you are going to go out of business, and especially today, where things are very much more difficult. That is how we are.

Ultimately, we have created a situation in which all the critical imperatives, have been mercifully subordinated to these short term economic ends, ad we are told this is normal and acceptable. Everybody tells us that it is desirable. What we need if we are going to survive, is the opposite. We need, once more, to mercilessly and ruthlessly subordinate our economic activities, to social, ecological, climatic and moral imperatives.

There is no alternative to this because, it is not important that we produce a lot more plastic buckets, it does important that we produce millions more motor cars and refrigerators. These are in essence, toys - amusing toys - and we have created a society, in which we all depend upon these toys. We have created a world in which we are all dependent on these preposterous toys (because that is what they are) and it is a totally ridiculous state of affairs.

We need to create a society which is no longer dependent on these toys. We need, as a matter of necessity, to reduce our dependence on these toys, because these toys are very destructive toys. We have to urgently realise that we can live without motor cars, refrigerators and all the garbage produced by industrial corporations - because man has lived on this planet for millions of years and he lived very well without these toys, in the past. But we cannot live, without a stable climate, we cannot live without an ozone layer to protect us against ultraviolet radiation, and we cannot live without healthy forests, rivers, streams, groundwater and fertile soil.

Those are the real resources - resources which our economists have not yet even identified as being real wealth. They have not even realized that they are the Earth's resources! These phenomena are just taken for granted yet it they which are the real resources, not the destructive toys produced by industrial corporations. It is the planet's natural resources which we have to preserve, and it is stable societies, which we have to develop, in the next decade - very soon. We do not much time left.

It is essential that we realise that these are the resources (stable ecosystems and stable societies) on which we depend, and that what we regard as our resources today, are no more than toys. It is imperative that we realize that can possess these toys, so long as they do not interfere with the preservation of the resources (stable ecosystems and stable societies) upon which we must ultimately depend.

The sort of society that can achieve stability, must necessarily be a society which conducts its economic activities on a very much smaller scale. A stable society is one which caters for a very much smaller market. There is no alternative. A stable society must inevitably be a low energy, low resource and low polluting society. A stable society has to be a society with small-scale economic activities catering for a small market which will have a lot in common with the societies of the past.

That is why I personally look to the past. But, needless to say, you cannot reconstitute the past. You cannot eradicate the experience of the last 150 years, which is obviously, indelible. We will marked by it. You cannot just wave a magic wand and make the last 150 destructive years disappear. We have been affected by it. But what we can do is, inspire ourselves, by the past, by the traditional societies we know about, to see how they managed, and develop the sort of societies that we will have to develop.

These new societies shall, of course, be influenced by the experience of the last decades, and maybe during the last decades, we may have invented certain things which may be of use in developing these societies. Some of the technologies we have developed may well be of use. That is perfectly possible.

But preserving the planet's ecosystems, and developing stable societies, must certainly be our goal. I am afraid to say that so long as we do not regard it as our goal, and indeed our overriding goal - and so long as our governments do not say: "We are faced with extinction. This is the greatest challenge we have ever been faced with, so we urgently have to make our survival a priority over everything else." - and so long as we do not realise that, then we do not have very much hope.

Thank you very much!