The American biologist Edward Wilson once said that the human species is an "environmental abnormality". We rationalise the destruction of the planet as if we live somewhere else. And, we are now told (in a 2013 paper presented to the Royal Society) that we may be seeing the end of this civilisation if we don’t change our ways and change them soon. Yet we continue to behave like those poor souls on the Titanic who couldn’t stop dancing even after their ship had hit an iceberg.

It does not seem to have entered our consciousness that if the planet suffers, we suffer, and that we have nowhere else to go. We have lost sight of ourselves as being a part of nature,  that destroying the natural world means destroying ourselves. By alienating ourselves from nature we have reduced it, and by extension ourselves, to an exploitable resource. In the Islamic tradition, we are required to submit ourselves to the divine presence, not dominate the natural world to serve our consumerist appetites.

So, industry will continue to expand; banks will continue to lend the money they create out of nothing; "under-developed" countries will strive to emulate the rampant Chinese and Indian economic models; developed nations, particularly in the West, will continue to covet the world's resources, even if it comes to waging war for them. The current financial crisis has brought to light the fact that money doesn’t exist. It is artificially created. This explosion of artificial wealth provides the illusion of economic dynamism but, in reality, it is parasitic. Endless credit (perpetual debt) devours finite resources. If kept up, this would eventually result in the Earth looking like the surface of the Moon, as it already does in some places.