ABSTRACT
The future, as we know, looks increasingly problematic. Soil has been rapidly eroding one agriculturally productive land, water is becoming an ever more scarce resource, and biodiversity is in such serious decline that there is an unprecedented mass extinction of species underway (Harper, 2008, pp. 47-57). In tropical forests where 50% of all land species live, estimates suggest that between 4,000 and 6,000 species have been disappearing every year (p. 57). India once produced 30,000 separate varieties of rice, but today most rice production is centered on 10 species. In other words, “the world’s available gene pool” (Harper, 2008, p. 62), has shrunk inexorably! And this is to say nothing of climate change, pervasive hunger among many of the world’s peoples, or the unsustainable dependence of almost all societies on fossil fuels. James Lovelock, who articulated the Gaia thesis that the earth is a living organism, estimates that by the end of this century there will be nearly 5 billion less people on the planet than there are currently (cited in Aitkenhead, 2008).
