Dear Sir/Madam,

"The Environment Agency is urging people to make a pledge to help save the planet" (from Tiny changes make big difference to planet, in today's Guardian).

It made me wonder if Sarah Ferguson (the Duchess of York) and other members of the jet set might be persuaded that "saving the planet" would be a more "whiz thing" to do than flying in Concorde, or whatever indulgence and show of extravagance and non-sustainability has replaced it.

It also made me think that we (society at large) are like a crowd of drunkards who have stumbled into a building site and are now 100 metres above the ground performing balancing acts on steel girders and cracking jokes, oblivious in our drunken stupor to the mortal danger we are in.

How can anyone talk about "saving the planet" in such a matter of fact tone? Unless, of course, they do not mean it seriously, which I suppose they don't.

Or is it because, if they do say it "seriously", most other people will assume they are nutters.

I sometimes find myself talking about "saving the world" tongue in cheek, because I have found that talking about it too seriously alienates people. They see you as a fantasist, a prophet of doom going round proclaiming that the "end is neigh". While rational, educated people know that such prophets spring up in every age and have always been proved wrong. We are still here, aren't we? and it is safe to assume that we still will be in a 100 years time.

No doubt the planet will be here in 100 years time and there will still be human beings living on it. But how many there will be of them and the conditions under which they will live can only be a matter of speculation. The way things are going at the moment, their prospects (those of our own children and coming generations) do not look good.

The trouble is that all attempts to "save the planet" (i.e. to avoid the catastrophic consequences of human activity, the plundering of Earth's limited natural resources and the disruption of its climate and life-supporting ecosystems this is causing) do not go to the root cause of the problem, which is to be found in our more animal than human nature, upon which society and the economy are still very largely based and dependent, and our blindness or refusal to face up to it.

As a society we are intoxicated with our own success (like the drunkards who have manage to scale the giddy heights of a building still under construction), unable to recognise the mortal and (on a historical time scale) immediate danger we are in.

A second article in today's Guardian (Can you put a price on the UK? Yes, it's £4,983,000,000,000) illustrates another major obstacle to "saving the planet": our irresponsible and amoral, if not downright immoral, values, attitudes and aspirations relating to MONEY (all perfectly legal and an integral part of the society and economy we inherited from our parents), and our blindness to where they are leading us. 

Suggesting that you can put a price on the UK you would think is meant as a joke, but not at all. Everything has to have a price, so that economists can quantify it and enter it into their equations. What is the value of a non-renewable resource, such as oil? 30 dollars a barrel, or whatever it is that the market demands. Most of us will no longer be here to respond to the reproaches of our grandchildren when they ask why we squandered this, and so many other "natural treasures", on such unnecessarily extravagant and materialistic lifestyles, instead of using it sparing so that they too and their children and grandchildren might have some use of it as well? Not to mention global warming and climate change and the catastrophic consequences this is likely to have on their lives.

All we care about is the price of oil, so that we can continue to drive our cars and jet off into the sunshine once or twice a year (governments and companies, so that they can remain "competitive").

We should be utterly ashamed of ourselves for the way we are plundering and spoiling what after all is not just our planet. We are a disgrace to Creation, destroying even our own children's future.

The reason we aren't (ashamed) is because we are too damned blind and stupid to realise what we are doing.

And it is not just George Bush and Dick Cheney. The rest of us (including most Guardian readers) are hardly any better.

When are we finally going to wake up?!

Or are we doomed to sleep walk or stagger drunkenly and joking into oblivion?