BBC News Online has in October released a six-part series titled 'Planet under Pressure':

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3686106.stm

One paragraph in the introduction states: "The challenge we face is not about feeling guilty for our consumption or virtuous for being 'green' - it is about the growing recognition that, as the human race, we stand or fall together."

Do you agree that this is what 'the challenge we face' is about? What do you think is 'the challenge we face'?

Good question. The challenge we face is getting the policy right in the face of theories and counter-theories and endless scenario-building.

In relation to pressures on the planet resulting in detrimental conditions for all life on it?

The Challenge we ALL face is in recognising and dealing effectively with the fact that a few people with Billions of dollars at stake frequently take action to protect their investments at the risk of inflicting permanent and irreversible damage to everyone else and future generations who will live or die with those consequences. It is in recognising that by allowing and even assisting in the destruction of a delicate environmental balance ( as in Equatorial rainforrest regions like the Amazon and Indonesia) we aid the destruction of our own life and lifestyle.

The biggest single challenge we all face is in providing enough cheap and renewable electrical energy to all people on this planet and to those who will be born if we do nothing to address population growth as a planet.

Buckminster Fuller had a plan to achieve this decades ago but our political inability to trust our neighbours has denied the planet this achievable goal. As has the greed of Oil , Coal and Uranium magnates.

"The challenge we face is not about feeling guilty for our consumption or virtuous for being 'green' - it is about the growing recognition that, as the human race, we stand or fall together."

I don’t think we will all fall together. We’ll fall in a very disparate manner, not dissimilar to what we’ve witnessed over the last few decades; with chronic poverty and famine in some places and affluence and chronic overconsumption is others. Some will hardly suffer at all. In fact, whole societies could well benefit from climate change.

In anything other than the worst nuclear winter scenario, large numbers of people will adapt and bring the human race through the looming collapse and continue the Anthropocene epoch.

The challenge we face is to realise that we are part of the natural scheme of things on this planet and learn to live in harmony with our life-support systems.

Oh snore!! That sounds like unmitigated greenie crap.

So how about this then…

We need to stop obeying a couple of the key ecological principles that drive us and all other animals….

The principle of breeding up when times are good, or at any time when opposing forces don’t keep our reproductive rate down,

and

The drive to be greedy and competitive…to get what we can for ourselves and our offspring, our colony or our society (perhaps comparable to an ant nest or beehive in ecological terms) while we can.

Can we do these two things?

Hell no. No way in the world. We are just an animal and we are under the same ecological principles as all other animals, just on a different order of magnitude. So Gaia will put us back in our place when she’s good ‘n’ ready. And that’s that!

Absolutely correct, Ludwig.
Humans only respond to crises. Until then we will continue as always until the crunch comes. Then there will be great lamentations across the land, upswellings of grief, tearings of hair and beatings of breast as we cry, "Why did no one tell us this was going to happen?" And T S Elliot will be proven right as we expire with a whimper.

Do you think the greed is because people are no longer satisfied when they have 'enough' or perhaps have lost the knowledge of what 'enough' is?