ABSTRACT
Having covered a lot of ground in the previous chapters, I would like to consolidate things and check whether we really do have a problem? Do we have an environmental crisis, and is this because we don’t understand our roots are in the Earth? Some years ago I worked for local government as Director of Sustainability. At a seminar with councillors I mentioned the need to ‘solve the environmental crisis’. One councillor replied ‘What crisis? It is news to me!’. Thankfully, at that time others spoke up, saying ‘Where have you been the last thirty years?’. However, the question is still out there, the question of whether we really have a problem? The problem of ‘shifting baselines's has been noted by Pauly (1995), where successive generations adjust to the state of the environment they find, so a degraded ecosystem may be accepted as ‘normal’. If people don’t visit wilderness and natural ecosystems they may not realize just how degraded other ecosystems have become. Many people seem to think that those who talk about an environmental crisis are just on about ‘tree hugging's and that the consequences of how we have treated the Earth are being alarmingly overstated. So, is there really an environmental crisis? Are we close to environmental catastrophe? Are humans really dependent on Nature? Do we have a crisis because we refuse to accept that we are dependent on Nature to survive?
