Dear Sir/Madam

The negotiators' failure to reach agreement in the Hague about emissions of greenhouse gases will have little influence, one way or the other, on the fatal course we are currently steering our planet, Spaceship Earth (Prescott's race to save deal on climate change; Saving the world was never going to be easy; ET Comment and Opinion: A load of hot air, 27 November 2000).

If the negotiators had reached an agreement they would have returned home waving a piece of paper just like Neville Chamberlain did on his return from Munich in 1938, providing a brief illusion of "peace in our time".

In the 1930's most people failed completely to recognise the threat posed by Nazi Germany. Others recognised a threat, but completely misjudged its certainty and magnitude. And an ineffectual few saw that the threat was huge and demanded our undivided attention.

We are in a similar situation today, only now the threat is posed not by a fascist dictator, but by our own non-sustainable economic activity and lifestyles and their impact on our planet's life-supporting ecosystems and climate.

Our politicians tell us that they are facing up to the issue of sustainability, but they are not. In reality we continue to behave like bandits, literally plundering our planet of its natural resources and placing an ever increasing strain on the robust but not indestructible natural systems on which all life - including our own - depend.

You can only put so many straws on a camel's back before it breaks.

The Earth may represent a pretty big camel, which can carry a lot of straws, but there IS a limit!

We all have to place a certain number of straws on the camel's back in order to live, and although we do not know exactly how many it can carry, anyone who has seen and  appreciated the photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts during their missions to the Moon  of our blue planet, suspended finite and vulnerable like a jewel in the inky blackness of space, realises that there must be a limit.

A limit which will be exceeded if more and more people continue to pile on more and more straws.

But this - crazy as it may seem - is exactly what we are doing.

Everyone, once they can afford it, wants a car and to be able to fly in an aeroplane whenever they wish, as well as many of the other temptations that an amoral, growth-dependent economy is driven to provide us with.

At the moment everyone can pile as many straws onto the camel's back as they like, encouraged by a multibillion dollar advertising industry, and limited only by the money at their disposal.

If we keep piling on straws until the camel's back actually breaks, we will then have hard scientific proof of what the limit is - but it will be too late to be of any use, and millions, probably billions, of people will die as a result.

Once faced up to, the problem and its solution are very simple to understand.

It is facing up to them that is the real difficulty, because it calls so much into question: familiar ways of living and working; aspirations, values and attitudes that we have grown up with and are ingrained in us; and an economic system that has provided us with unprecedented wealth, on which we all depend, and in which we all have vested interests.

THE PROBLEM is that our planet, Spaceship Earth, has limited resources and a finite carrying capacity, while the demands placed on it by materialistic human desires and aspirations, and "economic necessity" are insatiable. It is as simple as that.

THE SOLUTION is just as simple: Earth's six (soon to be 8 - 10) billion inhabitants must learn to live within (well within) the limits set by its carrying capacity, which means changing from our present non-sustainable economy and materialistic life styles to ones that are sustainable and less materialistic.

If you are thinking that the solution is a lot easier said than done, you are right of course. 

But it can be done. If we wish our children and coming generations well, it must be done.