It is good to hear you encourage the President to take climate change seriously in today's editorial ("Climate Signals"), but you too fail to recognise the full magnitude of the problem we face. Instead of confronting the difficult truths contained in the Club of Rome's "The Limits to Growth" when it was published more than 30 years ago, we went into collective denial. Now, reality is catching up on us.

Man’s 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. This same behavioural programming is now focused on the struggle for survival and advantage in the "socio-economic environment ", which in the modern world largely boils down to making money in the local, national or global economies. 

This explains why - at terrible peril, if not to ourselves, to our children and coming generations - we persist in giving the economy (the household of man) priority over ecology (the household of our planet). The consequence is that we are being driven (by our animal nature) to quite literally plunder the planet.

In view of what Darwin taught us about human origins, this should hardly surprise us, but like Christian fundamentalists, we refuse to accept, or even contemplate it. Why? Because doing so would undermine the religiously held values, attitudes and (material) aspirations that underlie (not just) the American way of life.