Introduction

Pandemics can be spread in hours across the world by the millions who travel by air, and future ones could be more deadly than Covid-19. Global warming is the product of the Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the late eighteenth century and changed everyone’s life more fundamentally perhaps than anything has done since humans stopped being hunters and settled down to till the land. War became potentially fatal to industrial civilisation in August 1945 when the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Americans believed that their own contribution was the greatest followed by the Soviets and that British and Chinese were minor. When the Second World War ended in August 1945 people rejoiced across the United States and Europe, but they had fought a war against three dissatisfied Axis powers, and now they were faced with many more restless nations. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.