Now that most of the hyperbole of millennium fever has died down, I find that many correspondents in my local press and even in the staid scientific journals are expressing vague fears regarding the future of mankind.
An analysis of the environmental perils facing society offers little reassurance. Population problems seem to be intensifying, made worse by religious and ethnic intolerance and suspicion. The abuse of minorities continues apace. There are threats of spreading new infections, notably those from the human immunodeficiency viruses and others for which we have inadequate therapeutic remedies. There are environmental disturbances introduced by greedy and shortsighted humans into the natural scheme of things, some of them grave threats to society and civilisation itself.
Curiously enough, a consensus now seems to have developed among serious scientists, to judge from the papers they publish in reputable journals, that the prospect of global warning has to be taken seriously and is not a fancy of the scare-raising journalists. Two decades ago, or even more recently, there were indications that the temperature of the earth's atmosphere might rise and induce changes in vegetation and wildlife in general, but the idea was regarded as fantastic and a dangerous exaggeration. The notion was dismissed by politicians and business developers who had no intention of cutting their consumption of energy and production of pollutants involved in industrial processes.
Now we are hearing news of wild flowers blooming before their expected time, disturbances in wildlife patterns, floods, rising sea levels, and unprecedented perturbations of wind and weather. Even the sceptics are beginning to change their tune, and reluctantly accepting that there might be something in the mad notion of a greenhouse effect. And, as always, there are pronouncements from fanatical groups, prophesying doom and destruction to mankind.
Sober reflection, it is to be hoped, will lead to a curbing of human arrogance and shortsighted greed, which might help to diminish the shadow that hangs over our earth and its people. That may indeed prove a forlorn hope, since it assumes that we can restrain our demands for more and more for less and less, and bring to the forefront of our minds the idea that insisting too greedily on our rights to the riches of the earth must also consider another aspect of life, which is responsibility for one another and the systems which we seek to modify to our advantage. Above all, the concept of holism needs restating. This maintains that to concentrate on one element of a situation to the neglect of all the other factors which operate in it is a sure recipe for catastrophe.