The new German 'ecology tax' made petrol prices rise by more than 20% in 2001; the public outcry was much fainter than anticipated - the tax obviously points into the right way for the majority of the people.

The impact of human life on our environment is huge and will become bigger as the population increases. And most of the world's population still lives in (very) bad conditions and desperately needs to improve them.

On the long run this will mean more production of goods, more technology and more use of energy. Considering the environmental side-effects we need to change the ways of producing and using technology drastically. Our products need to live longer, to use less energy and material for production and have a planned way of recyling.

This will make most of our goods more expensive; but if you factor in the environment they will actually be much cheaper. In the last 20 years we have seen massive changes to technology and production in terms of energy comsumption - but we still have a long way to go.

The societies have to force themselves to come to new and better solutions - the global community of persons, groups and organisations caring for our environment has to get stronger and work together more closely for that goal.