Dear Sir,

The Concorde tragedy is now more than a week behind us and what seemed inappropriate to bring up at the time, can perhaps be brought up now: the fact that Concorde is the epitome of non-sustainability and a symbol of the attitudes that are driving civilisation towards its biggest and perhaps final catastrophe aboard our finite and vulnerable planet, Spaceship Earth.

Spaceship Earth will not crash and disintegrate in a ball of fire, but as its life-supporting ecosystems begin to break down during the course of the 21st Century under the strain of 8 - 10 billion people all pursuing the kind of extravagant, non-sustainable life styles that regular Concorde passengers already take for granted, it will cease to be able to support more than a fraction of its present population at even a very modest standard of living.

The passengers aboard that ill-fated Concorde probably had no more than a minute or so to regret not having opted for another means of reaching their destination, but by then it was already far too late. 

Aboard Spaceship Earth we still have a bit of time. Our situation is not yet hopeless,  but it will soon become so, if we fail to realise that our present efforts to achieve sustainability are barely scratching the surface of the problem and will be in vain unless we take a radical look at the non-sustainable, though still widely accepted, values and attitudes that underlie it.

These values and attitudes are well-expressed in an article which appeared in last Wednesday's Telegraph (Supersonic luxury loved by the stars, 26 July 2000).

Nearly half of Concorde's passengers, it is reported, are company chairmen, managing directors or board executives, while the rest are people such as Lady Thatcher, Michael Winner, Joan Collins, Sir David Frost (who has used it more than 400 times!), Dr Henry Kissinger, Sir Sean Connery, the Prince of Wales, Kirk Douglas, Michelle Pfieffer, Luciano Pavarotti and Jonathan King (who likes it because it gets him from his home in Bayswater to his apartment on the west side of Manhattan at exactly the same time he left!).

Instead of being ashamed of themselves for setting such a bad example with their grossly extravagant and non-sustainable life styles, most of these Concorde passengers are manifestly proud of it. They fail to recognise that most of the six billion other people they share this planet with are looking to them and striving to live similarly extravagant lives, which will inevitably overload and damage Earth's life-supporting ecosystems.

To understand what that will mean, one need only think back to the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, when an explosion in an oxygen tank damaged that spacecraft's life-support systems. Fortunately, the crew were able to get safely back to Earth. On board Spaceship Earth, however, we have nowhere to get back to. Either we sort the problems out, i.e. achieve sustainability, on board or we perish.

I was disappointed to hear the Prince of Wales mentioned among those who frequently fly (or flew) Concorde, because in other ways he shows much good sense in respect to sustainability.

Ironically, the very people we expect to steer us from the fatal, non-sustainable course we are currently on, to one that is sustainable, are among those with the most non-sustainable live styles of all. 

How are they going to persuade the rest of us to adopt sustainable, less extravagant and materialistic life styles, if not by example?

Contrary to what I said above, perhaps our situation aboard Spaceship Earth is already hopeless.