Dear Editors,

 

I beg to differ: Montreal was not a "big step", but a very small step forward ("Climate improves at Montreal"). Notwithstanding that one must be grateful even for that, it is not going to solve the problem of us achieving sustainability for 7-9 billion people on our finite and vulnerable planet.

 

We are all in the same boat (let's call it the Titanic or Spaceship Earth), which is holed below the waterline, with water currently gushing in at 1000 litres per second (representing the extent to which we are exceeding our planet's ability to sustain the (steadily increasing) drain and strain we are placing on its finite resources and carrying capacity). The Kyoto and Montreal agreements represent the prospect of us pumping out no more than 100 litres per second, while the inflow (as China, India, etc come on stream) will increase. You don't need to be a mathematician to work out that sooner rather than latter the boat is going to sink - taking us all, first, second and third class, with it.

 

Perhaps the most difficult thing to grasp is that humankind, whom the 18th Century biologist, Carl Linnaeus, very misleadingly gave the name Homo sapiens to, is in fact incredibly blind and stupid. It is as clear as day that we are heading towards global catastrophe, but anyone who points this out - as I'm doing now - is ignored or dismissed as a crackpot. We are in a state of "collective denial" about our dependency on, and addition to, a growth-dependent economy and grossly materialistic lifestyles (and lifestyle aspirations) that, on a finite planet, are fundamentally unsustainable.

 

Please, allow me to explain why we are so blind to the perilous situation we have got ourselves into, since only then is it possible to recognise it. It's terribly frightening, but sticking one's head in the sand isn't going to help. On the contrary, it makes our situation truly hopeless, when it needn't be - provided we face up to reality and start taking the necessary measures, which, more than anything else, means changing some of the values, attitudes and (material) aspirations on which our economy and way of life are based.

 

I know, it's difficult and painful to face up to (like the birth of a child*). At the moment we still have the possibility of achieving sustainability in our own (humane) way. If we fail to do so (which we certainly will the way things look at the moment) a ruthless mother nature will do it for us. The climate change we are witnessing is her just "warming up" for the job. If it entails reducing human numbers by several billion, or even eliminating our species entirely, that is what she will do. She is not squeamish.

 

* If (but only if) we face up to it, the pain will dissolve into joy, as we set about creating a wonderful new, sustainable (more just and humane, but far less materialistic) society.

 

Now to my explanation of human blindness:

 

Taking an anthropological view of our situation and the challenge of achieving sustainability helps provide some of the objectivity necessary to overcome this blindness:

Man is not a fallen angel, but an animal (see Darwin), Earth's Greatest (aspiring) Ape, who greatly and dangerously overestimates his own powers, especially in respect to understanding and reason. Our social behaviour evolved over millions of years to serve the survival and advantage of individuals and family groups in the natural environment; there has been no time for it to adapt to the much larger social units of human civilisations, which only arose in the past few thousand years.

In addition, the natural environment has effectively been replaced by an artificial "socio-economic environment ", where modern capitalism developed and been honed to exploit our primitive, animal nature (our animal fears, greed, competitiveness, our interest in sex, in free or cheap lunches, in power, social status etc). The struggle for survival and advantage, which is programmed into us, continues, very largely, as the struggle for power and status (money) in the local, national or global economies, which explains why we give priority to the economy (the household of man) rather than ecology (the household of our planet), when it is obvious (even to a child, were we adults not in denial and afraid of biting the hand that feeds us) that achieving sustainability and securing human survival demands the opposite.