Why? Because the age of industrial expansion, with its astonishing technological advances, was based on the illusion of resource abundance and environmental stability. This is coming to an end. Oil, nature’s alchemy and humanity’s curse, is now at peak years of production, leaving in its poisonous trail accumulated carbon emissions that are raising global temperatures and destroying the planet.

Polar ice is melting and the land is burning. Pacific islands are disappearing beneath the waves while drought-riven farms are abandoned. Coastal cities are flooded and broken by increasingly violent storm surges and hurricanes. Right here, right now.

International efforts to control climate change have failed and the issue of resource depletion is barely acknowledged by governments. Why? Because the over-riding objective of our political and corporate elites is not the necessary restructuring of the economy through which human need can be balanced against the capacity of the planet to maintain nature’s astonishing web of life.

Perversely, they are determined on an opposite course; to extend the globalised, capitalist system of production with all of its inherent destructive forces. Material accumulation, however obscenely unequal in its distribution and short-term in its enjoyment, is valued higher than the future of life on the planet.