Dear Polly Toynbee,

Your comments in today's Guardian concur with my own view of the "media disease" afflicting our society. However, after diagnosing cancer, your suggested therapy amounts to little more than an extra dose of aspirin for the patient, it seems to me (Breaking News, 5 September 2003).

The vital organs of British society are riddled with different types of cancer (a consequence of modernity), with the one afflicting the media being of a particularly nasty kind. But no medicine and not even the most skilful surgery can remove or kill cancers so intimately associated with healthy tissue (the fabric of society) without fatally damaging the patient's vital organs.

A hopeless situation? From most perspectives, yes (thus your hopelessly inadequate suggestions for treatment). But not from mine.

The patient (society) we are currently dealing with cannot be saved and is going to die. You and your friends are wasting your time trying to cure it or prolong its life. 

Instead, we have to create a new, alternative society (within but distinct from existing society). It is the only option we have, not least, because we have so little time before the catastrophic consequences of the plundering of our planet (the ever-increasing drain and stain we are placing on its finite resources and carrying capacity) begin to overtake us.

Our entire civilisation is based on an economy which itself is based more on our "animal" than "human" nature. This is the core of the Problem.

We have to create a society based on an economy based, conversely, more on our human than animal nature. This is the essential solution of the Problem.

It will have to be created within and parallel to existing, non-sustainable society, on which we all currently depend, so that as it grows we can transfer more and more of our dependency from one to the other.

Because we all depend on existing, non-sustainable society (its economy and lifestyles), it is understandable that nobody is prepared even to contemplate changing anything that would disadvantage themselves. Every industry, from shareholders and management down to the shop floor, is primarily concerned with defending its own narrow, but all-dominating, interest in making money (profits, wages, salaries, bonuses, dividends, etc).

An alternative, sustainable society will have to include limits to income and wealth differentials (I wrote to you once before about the idea of a "maximum wage"). We cannot have actors (no matter how good or famous they may be) getting paid 10 times, let alone 100 times, more than a nurse, for example. On the other hand, no one can be forced to accept such limits - it has to be voluntary; which requires an entirely different social and economic culture, based on our "more human" than "animal nature" (it is our animal nature, and the economic culture based on it, that insists on us taking as large a slice of the cake as possible, not our human nature, which would be content with a fair share).

The beginnings of an alternative, sustainable economy already exist (organic farming, fair trade, ethical investment funds, cooperatives, recycling, renewable sources of energy, etc.) but they are forced to operate within the framework and philosophy (based on our animal nature) of existing, non-sustainable society, and thus cannot develop and blossom as they must.

If you would like to know more about my ideas (not just for improving the world, but for saving it from self-destruction), you can visit my website or give me a ring. I could do with a bit of journalistic support.

Yours sincerely