Once upon a time, when people first began to live in towns they said 'Hey, this is cool, man. Here we are, in a house, and there is a shop where we can get food, and our rubbish gets taken away, and water comes from a pump. Who needs the countryside. The countryside is for hicks and bumpkins.'
And cities grew larger and larger. And the residents said 'Cities are really cool, man [please forgive my 1960s slang, it's all I have]. Cities have apartments, and water comes from taps, and we have air-conditioning in our homes and our cars and our offices. We eat in restaurants, where food, beautifully prepared, appears on our tables. The daily newspaper, and the mail, is delivered to our door, and when I want to cook the supermarket has food from all over the world. All the best minds are here, and we meet each other at parties, and concerts, and sports events, and we say witty things. If I want to show the children animals we go to the zoo. The countryside is for dummies.'
But as John Donne might have said - 'No city is an island'. The city people worked in offices, were paid money, and used that money to buy whatever they wanted. It never occurred to them to ask where the food or the water or the paper actually came from. You produced money, and they appeared. Nor did it ever occur to them to ask what happened to the waste the city produced from car exhausts and as sewerage or rubbish. Because they didn't go into the country, except occasionally in an air-conditioned car or plane to visit an air-conditioned holiday resort, they had no idea what was going on outside the city walls. In 2007 they were like the Romans of Roman Britain, living in walled cities while outside were the barbarians in the jungle.
So the city people, while they were enjoying themselves in restaurants and amusing themselves with intelligent conversation, hadn't realised that, in an attempt to feed them and water them, forests had disappeared, the land was flogged to death, rivers were drying up, the sea was polluted, thousands of plants and animals were going extinct, and the air was so full of greenhouse gas that the resulting temperature rise was going to make it impossible for the country to support cities any more. No matter how much money you had.
And then the city people said to the conservative politicians who also lived in the cities and travelled in air-conditioned comfort - 'Hey, you guys got us into this mess, what do we do now?'
But there was no time to hear their answer.