A report published last year by a number of organisations including the World Conservation Monitoring Centre at Cambridge University shows that environmental destruction is accelerating at an alarming rate. As well, since 1970 the consumption of wood and paper has increased by two-thirds, consumption of fish has doubled so that now they are in serious decline , carbon dioxide emissions have doubled and, perhaps most worrying, the overall situation is getting worse now that many developing countries are growing economically and beginning to deplete their own supplies of natural resources. It s also clear that global warming is causing serious problems to the world s climatic system. Figures recently released by the insurance industry show that 1998 was the by far the worst year on record for natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes and floods. During this one year the world suffered more than twice as much damage than in the decade of the 1980s.
Scientists expect the situation to get worse, with the world entering a new era of hurricanes.
The Indo-Europeans An observer from another planet would probably conclude that the human race has agreed to some sort of collective suicide pact, perhaps decided that life isn t worth living after all and resolved to make themselves extinct within the next hundred years. Or perhaps they d look back at history and come to the conclusion that this self-extinction was more or less inevitable from the beginning. Most of Europe was then inhabited by Neolithic peoples who, as the archaeological evidence shows, lived in a similar way to the native inhabitants of America and Australasia. As Riane Eisler shows in her book, The Chalice and The Blade , these people were artistic, spiritual and felt a strong sense of connection to nature. Their societies were remarkably egalitarian and non-hierarchical, with women afforded the same status as men.