| Abstract: | This series now comes to an appropriate end with the most menacing set of question marks ever raised about the future of the human race. During the past two decades—from the inauguration of the Club of Rome in 1967 to Margaret Thatcher's famous ‘green’ speech to the Royal Society in 1988—an ever growing volume of research has erased the old-time notion that we live out our lives in a steady-state world. As the bad news has spread—environmental pollution, acid rain, the warming of the oceans—a consensus of anxieties has found expression in a global fear for the future. Is there anyone who would gainsay the possibility that, as Mrs Thatcher put it, ‘with all these enormous changes—population, agriculture, use of fossil fuels—concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the planet itself’? The scale of these changes and the measure of the dangers they bring—these provide the range of cause and effect in Dr Woodell's reflections on the great harm we have done to the human environment. This is the one occasion when an editor can truly say: Read on for the survival of our species. |
