It’s just as well that India has sent something to the moon, and that Mars is being scrutinized for water, for in little more than a couple of decades, human beings will need another earth, with all its resources, to sustain themselves. The Living Planet Report 2008 — published by the WWF International with the Global Footprint Network, Zoological Society of London and the United Nations as partners — calculates that humans are using 30 per cent more resources than the earth can replenish each year. This is destroying forests and soil cover, polluting air and water, and leading to dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species. In economic terms, human beings are running up an “ecological debt” of more than $4 trillion every year. This doubles the estimated losses made by the world’s financial institutions as a result of the credit crisis everybody is panicking about at the moment. World populations, and their rate of consumption of the world’s resources, are growing faster than the rate at which technology is finding new ways to expand what can be produced naturally. So the report predicts that by 2030, if nothing changes, human beings would need two planets to sustain their lifestyle. Hence, according to the report, “the possibility of financial recession pales in comparison to the looming ecological credit crunch”.

The plummeting Sensex always feels like a more immediate crisis than fewer polar bears in the Arctic Circle. And that is the problem with ecological doom: the worst crises are always imminent (and even for these to happen, one has to project one’s imagination forward by at least two decades), whereas the credit crisis is in the here and the now. So a different kind of mindset — realistic, responsible, yet somewhat futuristic too — is needed to take such predictions seriously. This mindset then has to motivate not only individual users of the planet’s resources, the ordinary man, woman and child, but also local and global political wills and systems, radically changing individual as well as collective habits of consumption. Human beings must live, and they must allow other forms of life to live as well. But it is perhaps time to acknowledge that living beyond one’s means can cause actual and wide-ranging collapses, and that this is as true of the ecology as of the economy.