Sad fact is that one North European uses around 100 times the resources that a sub-Saharan African does. Ideally, we all stop using anything that is not naturally renewable, and adopt sustainable life-styles. But unfortunately, we, as a society, are hooked on consumption, and taught that it is our duty to contribute to, and ensure economic growth through hard work and consumption, by our political leaders, and the industrial entrepreneurs whose vested interests we contribute disproportionately to. I have often wondered by what chance, I happened to be born into one of the materially richest societies ever seen, instead of some fly-blown, impoverished country of the third world. It is our massive population explosion, and yes, industrial and scientific progress, that has most affected all parts of the planet, and destabilised and ruined stable and sustainable cultures such as the Native American Indians, the Aboriginal peoples of the southern hemisphere, and the nomadic tribesmen of African and Siberian plains, in the name of huge profits. Every advance we have made, has also brought huge costs to humanity, and are we really any happier than peoples living similar lives to their forbears, on the same land, with the same culture they had?
We have opened Pandora's box, and left the lid off for a long time. It is going to prove very difficult to put the lid back on. Revolution is not the answer, you just get back to where you started from.
Evolution, but quick, is what we need.
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