Our world is in turmoil today. Africa's more than any other part of the world. Today, the assertion is no longer an over-statement, that man is hardest pressed than in any other period since the industrial revolution a few centuries ago, to find workable solutions to the crisis facing mankind.

The intricate combination of human arrogance, greed for material things and self-deceit - result of willful ignorance of how the world works, or is supposed to work, according to God's inscrutable design, has conspired to threaten life itself on earth. All forms of life.

So that, those long-familiar and predictable cycles of nature that helped man cope with his existence, have all been dislocated.

Today, we have rains that do not just wet the soils to aid agriculture but that wash the soil away. Drought has become the lot of once thriving agricultural communities in Africa, at least. The polar caps are melting to swell the volume of the oceans. Coastal-lying districts of the world are being inundated or washed away by rising ocean tides.

Nations are earning fortunes unimaginable in history just on the strength of the resources that are accidentally found in their soils, as in Africa, but the majority live in grinding poverty with the continent's wealth stolen by a misguided and opportunistic few.

Tragically, the fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas that have under-pinned global economic growth in the last few centuries) have turned out to be the very Achilles heel of global economic health. Worse is that oil has become a curse rather than a boon to producing countries.

Our common world, experts agree, is today getting hotter not just from too much carbon substances being emitted into the atmosphere from our power stations, our industries, our airplanes, cars and lorries, and from the sundry conflagrations we set up in the blind pursuit of the mythical liberty to livelihood and 'happiness'.

The world is also heating up from sheer lack of hope for the majority whose broad interests have been subsumed in the narrow interests of politicians and private sector money managers who act and behave as if economic growth can continue indefinitely.

Politicians and their intellectual ideologues justify the short-sighted thinking and belief in the 'inverted-pyramid' theory of development on the grounds of economic determinism (the tyranny of market forces).

By extolling the virtues of capitalism, whose emergence as the leading human organizational ideology, following the implosion of communism in 1989, great crimes have been committed against humanity by world governments and the business class than probably a world war could manage to do. Millions have died, been displaced, living lives of want and need not because the world or their regions or countries do not have enough but because enough is never done, in the name of capitalist ideology, to distribute the wealth of nations equitably.

This assumption of unlimited, infinite economic growth potential within our world that is definitely finite, does not, of course, tally with the facts on the ground. Recent global economic crisis emanating from the United States of America last year and later spread to the rest of the 'developed' (and problematic countries like Nigeria) prove this.

The so-called economic 'successes' that most economies around the world were touting as indices of their 'growth' were actually more the result of high-stake, irresponsible, gambling by few unscrupulous economic managers than from any real value-added, real growth of the economies in question.

In Nigeria, just to show how environmentally uncritical the financial managers had become, one of the detained bankers was said to have purchased two private jets with depositors' money, and was on the verge of adding two more, before the Central Bank put a stop to it.

Now, it could be said that a private jet is not such a big deal and it's not. But in a country like Nigeria where vast majority of people cannot move around on foot, bicycle, buses or trains; a country that has not produced anything of worth 40 years after a civil war, it is positively criminal for a Nigerian who made money under these locust years to purchase or own a private jet.

Underlying present global economic crises are factors that are more environmental than merely financial; factors such as the life-style that modern man has taken for granted that encouraged competition, ostentation, greed and enormous waste of the 'limited natural resources' that nature has made available for the use of humans.

This life of waste that is fueled by the consumption of the limited and non-renewable resources available to peoples and nations has of course been seen to be unsustainable.

There is just so much oil, gold, iron, aluminum, uranium or whatever in our world. There are many other resources that are renewable. Some are not. In the absence of alternatives, world economy would be shaken.

It appears to be a double jeopardy for resource-rich but wasteful nations like Nigeria who stand to gain more as demand for non-renewable assets like oil peaks but would also lose even more when their economies and landscapes are ravaged due to effects of global warming and precipitate climate change.

Locally here in Nigeria the political leaders are still in the 'cold war' mode of primitive and suicidal competition over their nation's finite, and frankly 'unearned', wealth.

This is very evident when one looks at the administrative structures that 'failing nations' put in place. All the ministries and departments of government, in Nigeria at least, are geared towards rent seeking from the oil resources of the Niger Delta.

Underneath our current socio-economic and political woes lies the issue of the environment we have inherited or have created. The acceptance and practice of an economic ideology that recognizes no limiting factors in pursuit of profit in our limited environment is fundamental to the political instability and economic insecurity in the land.

A (free-market economic) doctrine that extols, as capitalism does, Darwin-type competition, conspicuous material consumption, and a winner-take-all political mentality in a world of finite resources, is clearly unsustainable. This is not a matter of ethics alone, it also has economic basis.

Regardless of what other departments of government do, in Nigeria at least, their activities have to take place under stable, safe, conducive and sustainable physical, spiritual and ideological environments.

It is all well to have a minister in charge of works, transport and the environment rolled together. But then, you cannot build or construct anything on 'environments' in ways and manners that pollute the environment are unsustainable and will eventually spell the death of populations and civilisations as the environmental crisis in Nigeria portends to do.

It is even conceivable that there is somebody who goes by the name of minister for the environment in the country today. His job will not be restricted to echoing G-8 climate change platitudes about their commitment to cutting carbon emissions that blight Africa and Asia.

Our environment minister should be at the base of all the economic activities in the country - from mining to petroleum extraction, to shipping; from road construction to sea navigation and dredging; from industrial production and manufacturing processes to education that will teach citizens the inter-connectedness of the globe.

The environment should not be seen as just matters pertaining to Niger Delta or the arid North: Everyone is under its tyranny.

The sooner serious-minded individuals are given the tasks of analysing and interpreting, for our policy-makers the environmental weather charts, the better for the country. That is who we need as minister for the environment, someone who can assist in navigating the cloudy weather facing countries like ours. Maybe.