At the beginning of the 21st century the various environmental problems have become perhaps the greatest challenge of the humanity and the most serious threat for the long-term well-being of the human population living on our planet.

The ancient problems related to soil fertility, erosion, desertification, salinisation and loss of nutrients, are still with us and damaging the food production in different parts of the world. The air in many cities is more polluted than perhaps ever before. Millions of people are still drinking water that has been polluted by human wastes and industrial pollutants.

Besides these age-old problems there is a truly frightening array of new environmental threats that have been produced by modern industrial development within a very short period of time, in less than a century.

One hundred years ago we did not even know that there is something, which is called the ozone layer. Now we know that it is threatened by destruction by various chemicals produced by the human civilization.

We started to use deep groundwater in a larger scale only a couple of decades ago. At that time we thought that this would be a solution to all our water needs, replacing the traditional water harvesting and storing technologies that had been in use for thousands of years. After fifty years of groundwater overuse we are faced with declining water tables and with a huge problem of groundwater pollution, the most striking example of which is the vast arsenic-poisoning epidemic in Bangladesh and in the states of West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh in India. While this is happening, the hundreds of thousands of traditional water harvesting systems are lying in ruins in South Asia, North Africa, Middle East, China, Latin America and elsewhere. In some cases the "answers" to the acute water problems dreamed by our governments, like the overly ambitious river-linking schemes, are almost as frightening as the actual problems the projects are supposed to solve.

The strengthening of the greenhouse effect is threatening to destabilize the whole climate of our planet. This would make weather conditions very unpredictable and cause major problems for agricultural production. The melting of Himalayan glaciers could lead to the drying of some of the most important rivers in Asia. The melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic glaciers could raise sea levels and drown most of the world's fertile farmlands, and also produce very large and dangerous tsunami waves.

While the worries related to global warming and its possible consequences are increasing, the US government has bluntly stated that it plans to increase the US carbon dioxide emissions by 40 per cent.

Many observers have claimed that the market mechanisms can take care of global warming and other environmental issues. However, in reality it seems that the present emphasis on market mechanisms is leading to a renewal of nuclear power and to the production of natural gas with a technology called underground coal gasification. In other words: instead of solving the problems the market mechanisms are leading the world towards a massive use of the two most dangerous and harmful ways of producing energy anybody has ever been able to conceive.

Most of the people living on Earth do not want all this. They would like to have clean air and clean water, they do not support the destruction of the forests. They would like to use energy whose production is not stabilizing the global climate. And they would like to leave a beautiful Earth, which has not been contaminated with radioactive waste for their children, grandchildren and for the innumerable generations which should have the right to be born on Earth after them.