This week, I propose to make a prediction. It is a serious prediction and a worrying one, perhaps. I would like you to discuss it - to reject it (with reasons) if you wish, to accept it and suggest how we can overcome it or maybe just to accept it and prepare for the worst...

We live, in the West, in a time of peace, unequalled in recent history. You live your lives and learn how to cope with a world that is often difficult but generally stable and presents no terrible threats outside your personal course of life (you may have very difficult family situations, or the threat of disease, but these do not threaten the world itself). Prosperity is generally increasing. There are wars being fought in many places in the world, but most of you can escape them, if they affect you, by coming to stable environments like this one, here, in Switzerland.

This will not last.

The politicians do not want to tell us this, because they need to be elected and bad news does not win elections. But look at the world. A tiny percentage of the world's population is using up space and resources at a terrifying rate. The countryside is disappearing faster than anyone dare tell us - in my lifetime alone many species of bird in Britain have diminished to a third or less of their former numbers. This may not strike you as very significant, but privately, scientists are very worried - it is a sign of underlying dramatic change. In my lifetime, the ecology of Britain has been catastrophically and irreversibly destroyed. It is actually too late to save it. Economic and political pressures are fiercely resisting some terrifying truths.

Suppose that the developing countries, quite understandably, aspire to the standards of living and use of resources that we take for granted. The world will not support it. Or, suppose that we try to stop them? Will they for ever accept to play the role of global underdogs, when they can see our pampered play all over the world and all over their countries?

We in the developed West advertise, proselytise and conspicuously show off a degree of arrogant wastefulness that cannot continue to expand as it is now doing.

Here is the prediction. In your lifetime, something quite apocalyptic will happen, which will undermine the very basis of the society we live in. I do not know what this will be, but I am convinced it is a very, very serious threat. It may be world war (my parents and my grandparents all lived through world wars - my mother was evacuated in the Blitz). It may be rampant disease, culling us as the Black Death culled so many in the Middle Ages. It may be famine or burn-out of resources. It may be something quite unexpected which intervenes first, like an asteroid or comet hitting the earth.

Is this a real threat or am I merely scaremongering? Should you be doing anything to prevent it - and if so, what? Or, should we be preparing ourselves for the worst?

Delaware recently won a debate, claiming that life was not too easy at Aiglon. That may be so, if Aiglon is to prepare you for what you think is ahead. But what moral, physical and spiritual resources might you need if this world we know is shortly to dissolve into apocalyptic chaos?

Are you ready?

I am.