Although the lives of women have greatly changed due to demographic, technological and educational factors, the traditional discriminatory ideas about employing women outside the home have hardly evolved at all.

Prisons, penitentiaries, reformatories or correctional institutions, are virtually the only form of legal punishment today. Those who overstep the laws of society are no longer deported, publicly humiliated, or inflicted with brutal corporal punishments, and rarely are they executed. They are shut away from society in prisons which, with few exceptions, provide a punitive, negative environment, in which offenders serve out their terms in a state of demoralizing idleness.

The traditional, reforming role of imprisonment is being increasingly questioned, and the morale of prison staff has suffered as a result. The initial ideal of rehabilitation has fallen prey to all the complexities of the modern crime problem. With the enormous increase in criminal activity, prisons are over-crowded. They are often little more than warehouses of despair where unhealthy and inhumane conditions erupt in violence, rioting and insurrection. With two or three people crowded into the space intended for one, there is little incentive for introspection and reflection. There are other conditions that militate against rehabilitation. For example, the deprivation of personal security, of mobility and of privacy. In some institutions there is never quiet. In others the lights are never turned off. The link with the outside world is often tenuous, with visits limited and correspondence censored, delayed, or sometimes thrown away altogether, according to the inclination of the current administering officials. These seemingly petty matters can cause extreme psychological damage.

The natural environment, human communities and traditional cultures are collapsing. Extremist leaders, politicians and media are pitting people against one another along cultural identities. Displaced from their homes by the combined effects of climate change, poverty and political violence, caravans and boatloads of desperate people are seeking refuge across state borders. Climate-change induced hurricanes, floods, droughts and biodiversity loss are realities.

In addition to the problems encountered of settling in a host country and attempting to find acceptance by the community of that country, refugees encounter difficulties in finding employment and housing. They have to adapt themselves to new environments, lifestyles, ideas about values and customs, and often to a foreign language. They run the risk of losing their native identity, especially when the culture is oral, and are constantly confronted with a feeling of the inability to participate and belong, a feeling which often leads to cultural rootlessness. Their children often have difficulty accessing schooling and, once admitted, experience problems in adjusting to new languages, teaching styles and standards. These people may also have a higher incidence of nightmares, inability to concentrate in school, and of the various kinds of aggression, withdrawal, and mental breakdown observed in people who have seen horrors which cannot be eradicated from their minds.

For the receiving countries, waves of refugees may cause severe and abrupt changes in the environment. Population densities multiply overnight, traditional land systems are disrupted and markets are disorganized. The presence of refugees may create xenophobia among the permanent residents, stir up prejudice and lead to factions which disagree ideologically with one another.

Bacteriological or biological agents of warfare are living organisms (or infective material derived from them) which are intended to cause disease or death in animals, plants, or man, and which depend for their effects on their ability to multiply in the person, animal or plant attacked. Various living organisms (for example, rickettsiae, viruses and fungi), as well as bacteria, can be used as weapons. The use of epidemic warfare on a strategic scale is liable to lead to the infection of a very high proportion of the population attacked, and even if the attacking country were protected (by immunization) from some specific strain, changes to more virulent forms might overwhelm the level of immunity. The chief types of bacterial and viral agents developed or considered have included: anthrax (bacterial), which can cause death in 24 hours if lungs are attacked; brucellosis or undulant fever (bacterial), which is fatal in 5% of untreated cases; tick-borne encephalomyelitis and mosquito-borne equine encephalitis (viral), which have no effective treatment, can be fatal and can cripple the nervous systems of survivors; bubonic and pneumonic plagues (bacterial); psittacosis (viral) which can be fatal in up to 40% of cases; Rocky Mountain spotted fever (rickettsial) which can kill in 3 days; tularaemia (bacterial), for which the untreated rate of fatality is 5-8%; typhoid and cholera (bacterial) which is extremely contagious; Q-fever (rickettsial); and chikungunya and dengue fevers (viral). Smallpox is one of the deadliest epidemic viruses known, but has been exterminated in the wild; the only stocks are in high-security research establishments in the USA and Russia.

Throughout the world, the vast majority of humanity's agriculture is non-sustainable and in spite of the substantial increase in food production over the past few decades, the present model of agriculture has not solved the world's hunger problem. In fact, our industrial, chemical intensive agriculture system has many damaging impacts. It degrades the fertility of soils, intensifies the effects of droughts and contributes to desertification, pollutes water resources, causes salinization, increases dependence on non-renewable energy, contaminates the food supply, and contributes to harmful climatic change. The knowledge, manpower, and resources exist to combat these escalating conditions, but the world's political and economic communities stand lethargic.