Since the early 1970s the academic world have been aware that there are three key drivers to the environmental damage that mankind inflicts upon his environment:
- Technology
- Affluence
- Population
Despite this invaluable, elegant and simple insight that was provided fifty years ago through the IPAT equation, in the intervening years the modern world has chosen to relentlessly pursue a Growth paradigm with regard to all these three key-drivers of climate and ecological collapse.
We have permeated this damaging mantra, almost without exception, throughout an increasingly challenged world; squandering our ecological capital in the process. No self-respecting financial manager would behave so recklessly with his financial capital. No risk manager would dice with death in this fashion. Even as we pass ever more climate tipping points, we continue to press our foot down on these three key-drivers. We are already locked into 2 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. That in itself is excessively dangerous, and if our behaviour patterns do not change massively, the end result is likely to escalate to 3-4 degrees, with much of the planet becoming uninhabitable.
Our persistence with this suicidal Growth paradigm inspired the poem ‘2020 VISION’.