It is fairly clear now that humans are contributing to global warming to some degree or another and, among other things, we humans are also responsible for;

• Massive pollution (e.g. the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – plastic trash covering 0.41% to 8.1% of the Pacific Ocean depending how you measure it).
• World wide crashing fish stocks and species extinctions,
• Desertification (China's Gobi desert is growing by 3600 square kilometres a year) and
• Deforestation (many thousands of acres a day are being cut down).

The effects are global. There is no point, for example, in you carefully safeguarding the fish at your end of the ocean, if they are migratory and the people at the other end of the ocean are fishing every last one out.

The two things that humans must do to enable themselves to survive indefinitely are:

1. Live on Earth in a manner that has a much 'lighter touch', live 'sustainably' - if each generation keeps leaving the world in a worse state for the next generation to inherit then the Earth will become uninhabitable at some point. It is only a matter of time. We don't really inherit the earth from our ancestors - we borrow it from our children.
2. Develop the capability to live in other places beyond the Earth. The former astronaut John Young once said. 'Earth's geologic history is pretty clear: It says, quite frankly, that single-planet species don't last. Right now we're a single-planet species. We need to fix that.' … 'The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years … is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.' There have been five major mass extinctions on the earth where the dominant lifeforms have been eradicated – we do not want to be part of the sixth.

Now point (2) above is probably a bit too much for us as individuals to influence but (1) we can do something about now.

We don't need to build fossil fuel heated houses. The extra initial cost of building a house that doesn't bleed heat into the atmosphere is easily recouped by the energy cost saved over its lifetime. Decent insulation and earth sheltering will deliver this capability and be much more sympathetic to nature into the bargain. By reducing domestic energy consumption we improve the country's energy security, reduce the pollution from energy generation, reduce energy transmission losses, reduce the trauma to the environment caused by extracting the raw materials required and so on.

We need to get to the point where each generation creates no more mess than it inherited and aspirationally make things better. The ever increasing burden on the future generations can be lifted. Otherwise it is just simple maths. If each generation adds X % more to the pollution or consumes Y % of finite components of the earth's resources then however small X and Y are, at some point in the future the human race is going to be in serious difficulty.

We need to change the way we live and now.