"It has cost $24 million and taken more than 1300 scientists in 95 countries four years to put together. This week, the first ever global inventory of natural resources was finally published. Its overwhelming conclusion: we are living way beyond our means.

According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, approximately 60 per cent of the planet's "ecosystem services" - natural products and processes that support life, such as water purification - are being degraded or used unsustainably. What is more, this degradation increases the risk of abrupt and drastic changes, such as climate shifts and the collapse of fisheries...

...The most obviously irreversible trend is the loss of biodiversity (see Chart - Link). Extinction rates today are perhaps as much as a thousand-fold higher than the norm throughout evolutionary history. Some 10 to 30 per cent of the world's land vertebrates are now threatened with extinction."

The danger is here, we all know it, for God's sake the signs have been there since the 1960s & 70s when man's effect on world ecosystems first came into focus. Do we have a chance to pull ourselves back from the brink? The findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment would suggest so, but only if we act now, and act on a large scale.

Once again I am reminded of an example from our ecological past...

Nowhere are the problems of environmental disharmony and increasing human population more vividly drawn than in the incredible true story of the Easter Islanders and the doomed fate of their obsessive and isolated civilisation. The Islander's fate acts as a microcosm for the modern rise of mankind. When there is only 1 tree left standing on the entire globe how many men will suffer for the chance to cut it down?

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