"It is necessary to destroy the village in order to save it from communism" was the kind of thing the US military used to say in the Vietnam war back in the '60s. Today, the world's addiction to fossil fuels — that's coal, oil, and gas to you and me — has the same crazy twisted logic, threatening to wreck the environment on which we all depend. In just a few decades, our addiction to these fuels has driven up levels of heat-trapping gases in the Earth's atmosphere to levels not seen in millions of years.

The overwhelming majority of the world's top climate scientists paint a horrendous picture of the greenhouse world we risk creating unless we cut down on the emission of gases like carbon dioxide. In Europe we will experience more storms and floods. Glaciers and polar ice caps will continue melting, so that we may lose the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets completely. This could add around 6 metres to global sea level, with catastrophic effects.

But the greatest impacts will be on the world's poorest people in parts of Africa and Asia — those least able to protect themselves from rising sea levels and increased drought and disease. Tens of millions of people will lose their homes as a result of flooding and tropical cyclones. Responsibility lies overwhelmingly with the richest countries: Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia. With just 20 percent of the world's population we have the longest track record of climate pollution and are still by far the biggest climate wreckers. Our behavior is nothing but arrogant in the extreme — some go as far as to call it "carbon aggression." And what do we use it for? In an increasingly globalized economy, we waste it on massive movements of energy-intensive goods and services over longer and longer distances. Even the materials that go to make a simple drink can have traveled thousands of miles.

Then we throw the can away, and the whole process is repeated. Economic growth is good news when it delivers real improvements in quality of life — such as better education and healthcare, more nutritious food, more time for family and community. But growth which undermines the very fabric of nature on which we depend is mad.

Growth for its own sake is the ideology of a cancer cell. We have to move away from a dumb economy that chews up, spits out and destroys nature and people towards a smart one which operates within natural cycles: we need to learn to live within limits. This doesn't mean poverty. It means a different kind of wealth. It means endless opportunities for appropriate and environmental technologies, for locally-produced food.

The world desperately needs this kind of "smart growth." It means more than just PR. A company like BP spends millions re-branding itself as a company that is moving "beyond petroleum." But the amount it spends on advertising this "new" image is far more than it actually spends on renewable energy sources such as solar power and the development of a hydrogen-based economy, which could run all our homes, cars, and industry without any pollution at all. There are mechanisms within the international climate treaty signed at Kyoto, and rejected by US President Bush, to help the transfer of clean technology to the developing world so that these nations can improve their standard of living and grow their economies without traveling along the same polluting road as the industrialized world.

Sorting out the current mess isn't going to be plain sailing. But we know where to start. We'll need international solidarity and strong international environmental and social agreements which help people to do more of what they need at a local level. Above all, we'll need more democracy. Some call it "Glocal-ization."

Doing as much as we can locally doesn't mean an end to free trade. It means an end to rigged trade, which exploits the poor and trashes the environment by not paying the full environmental and social costs.

The billions being spent on new oil exploration should be spent on getting out of dangerous and dirty fossil fuels, and getting into clean and safe renewable technologies, like solar photovoltaic panels (PV) for instance, which could provide electricity for the two billion people in the world who don't have access to it while creating new jobs and helping to make communities more self-reliant and stronger.

This is one of the biggest business opportunities of all time. So the denial of global warming is economically stupid, as well as scientifically illiterate and morally bankrupt.

This article is an excerpt from Take It Personally: How to Make Conscious Choices to Change the World by Anita Roddick. Copyright © 2001 HarperCollins Publishers. Used with permission.