Environmental crisis: seeking answers: do we take the environment seriously?

The speaker first surveys the history of the human depredation of the environment during the last 500,000 years, stressing the rapid growth of the population. While the human population was about 300 million at 1000 A.D., i.e. about 50 hectares of land per person, it more than trebled by 1750 A.D., so that there were about 15 hectares of land per person; at present, the population is surging towards 6 billion, thus leaving only about 2.5 hectares per person. Next, the speaker analyses the consequences of this rapid growth in terms of the ecological damage, energy and water problems, transport and urbanisation, etc.. The lecturer concludes with an outline of possible remedies, citing examples of measures adopted with success in various parts of the world where ‘the environment is taken seriously’.