International Seminar of Ecology – 2022

Europe's first conference on the environment was held in 1970 in Menton, France.This event was organized by Alfred Hassler on behalf of the "Fellowship of Reconciliation" (a pacifist and civil rights organization, https://forusa.org/)together with other leading intellectuals.The forum conceived and issued the so-called Menton Message which was further signed by two thousand, two hundred scientists and displayed at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm (Ivanova and Lele 2022).This statement was one of the earliest examples of a collective public alert by scientists demanding a societal change to cope with the environmental crisis and the nuclear weapons race that could lead to destruction of life on Earth.Numbering 3.5 billion people at the time of the Menton Message act, today, more than fifty years later, the World's population has reached an impressive count of 8 billion.The "Stockholm+50: a healthy planet for the prosperity of all -our responsibility, our opportunity" summit was held in June, 2022 (https://www.stockholm50.global/)as a historical legacy of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.Participants in the summit concluded that, despite the over five decades of efforts to restrain the damage of environmental threats, environmental challenges had even evolved deeper in their complexity and global impact.Humankind has reached the point of facing "a triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution'.These factors were recognized as a major prerequisite for hampering mankind's sustainable development, leading to poverty and the spread of diseases.'The persistence of this crisis was cited as bringing our Planet to "tipping points beyond which there would be little chance of recovery" (Savisaar 2022).