The problems are not only endless, but also deeply complex.

With the Industrial Revolution, mankind has seen an influx of environmental problems which have insidiously crept into our lives and are now causing havoc, upsetting the ecological balance of the world.

The earth is being pushed beyond its limits with an exponential increase in world population, which, according to the United Nations reached 7 billion in 2011, and is currently at 7.3 billion in 2015, according to worldometers.info, a site which tracks the world population live. Soon the earth will exceed its carrying capacity and humans will experience chaos in which temperatures rise to 2-3 degrees above their current levels, and the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases increase, speeding up global warming.

It’s crazy how much deforestation has gone on in the last few decades. Against the backdrop of climate change, 2/3 of the forests that have ever existed around the world have disappeared. Both boreal and tropical rainforests are being destroyed for commercial logging, and in the case of South East Asia, burning to make way for palm oil plantations. Experts predict that with the present rates of exploitation, all the world’s tropical rainforests will be gone between 2020 and 2090. Life-giving freshwater is being extracted at rates that are too fast for them to regenerate (they only generate at a slow rate of 1% per year. Groundwater and aquifers around the world are being drained, pumped more rapidly than their recharge rates. Some depleting aquifers are nonrenewable, such as the aquifer in Saudi Arabia, and will never replenish.

The list goes on. Then environmental crises are very real and they seem to be driven by human exploitation of nature and human greed. Could some kind of spiritual re-awakening bring people back to living life more sustainably?