“Economics as practiced today ignores natural capital. A true Hicksian profit requires that the capital base be left intact and only the excess is a true profit. But we have not left our natural capital base intact or anything like it.”

The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate... Many other civilizations, despite being armed with the same brains as we have, bit the dust or just faded away after the misuse of their resources.

It was always going to be difficult for us – Homo sapiens – to deal with the long-term, slow-burning problems that threaten us today: climate change, population growth, increasing environmental toxicity, and the impact of all these three on the future ability to feed the 10 billion people projected for 2100. Ten thousand years ago, or even a hundred years ago, these problems were either mild or non-existent. Today they are accelerating to a crisis.

A toxic stew of chemicals in the air, water, and soil is simply making our environment hostile to life... losses at this scale will have 'catastrophic' consequences for the environment and ultimately for us.