Madam, - The prognostications in Saturday's Irish Times Magazine were, if anything, too complacent regarding our future on a number of fronts. Most civilisations consume themselves into extinction, often abetted by climate change. The likelihood is that "western" civilisation will do so soon. Tragically, "western" now being global, the entire world will suffer.
The key lies with China, where even now our Taoiseach is negotiating Ireland's slice of the Chinese economic cake. China is in the grip of the largest and dirtiest industrial revolution since the 19th century. Consuming raw materials at a staggering rate, it is also destroying its environment at an equally alarming speed. With only 7 per cent of the world's arable land to feed over 20 per cent of the world's population, China cannot afford to be wasteful. Yet the country is losing its arable land at the rate of about one million hectares a year to urban and industrial sprawl, and to desertification.
Water supplies are already a problem for much of the country, yet over 80 per cent of all industrial and domestic waste is dumped, untreated, into local lakes and rivers.
China contains 14 of the world's 20 most polluted cities. Three-quarters of China's industrial energy is derived from coal burning. Not surprisingly, the two commonest causes of death are respiratory and gastric diseases resulting from pollution.
From this poisoned chalice, new strains of bird flu are the least we can expect. Nor can we reasonably expect the country's rapidly expanding middle class to say no to consumerism just as they're acquiring the taste for it. (The same can be said for India, not far behind China in all these statistics.)
Meanwhile, gas-guzzling America is running a massive trade deficit with China, while more and more Western manufacturing is being outsourced to China's ultra-cheap labour market. If China stalls for any reason - resource shortage, famine, disease, or the increasing but largely unreported worker and rural protests - the whole economic house of cards will collapse, taking us with it.
If the toxic industrial engine keeps running unchecked, a global catastrophe is assured. - Yours, etc.,
ANTHONY O'BRIEN, Tibet Support Group Ireland, Ailesbury Road, Dublin 4.