ABSTRACT
The turn of the millennium brought a combination of optimism, skepticism and fear. The Y2K, or what was referred to as the “millennium bug”, was a computer-related problem. There was concern that computer systems would break down, causing innumerous diculties and even severe disasters in the energy, economics, security, and transportation sectors. Terrorism, especially the 9/11 tragedies and, subsequently, the war in Iraq, which started in 2003, were other sources of grave anxiety. The 2008 global nancial crisis created a signicant decline in economic activity leading to recession. Concerns about climate change and global warming continued to grow with the increase of science pointing toward greenhouse gas accumulations from human related activity. This included the receding of Arctic glaciers and Arctic cap along with droughts in southwestern Australia and increased species extinctions, including the Black Rhino from West Africa.2 The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report in 2010 that delineated 10 key indicators of climate change, which included troposphere air temperature, sea surface and air temperatures, sea level, quantity of sea ice, ocean heat content, overland temperature, humidity, snow cover and glacier size and movement. Natural disasters, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), hurricane Katrina (2005), Kashmir earthquake (2005), cyclone Nargis (2008), the Haiti earthquake (2010), the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (2011), superstorm Sandy (2012), and the Haiyan typhoon (2013), all contributed to greater awareness and reoccurring dangers of our inescapable relationship with the natural environment.
