The human population of the world cannot continue to grow without doing great harm to the planet's ecology. Much of this harm may be irreversible. Our efforts to improve our quality of life will, one day, turn on us and be their very own undoing.



But it is not simply a matter of the total number of humans which is, and will continue to be, the cause of our problems. It is also the distribution of the population, in fact, at present it is more the distribution of the population which is causing problems than the total population.



London has a population of around 7 million, New York, over 8 million and in the emerging nations the figures are worse with Beijing at over 10 million and Mumbai nearly 14 million. Such concentrations of populations put an intolerable strain on rescourses. The cost of transporting produce to these city's, both in terms of hard cash and environmental damage, is putting the entire world at risk.



But nothing will happen to put this situation right, because we are all NIMBY's, we are all greedy (some far more so than others) and we are not prepared to give up anything for anyone.