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Tuesday, June 01, 2004
...the planet's crumbling
Our boat is sinking, we know the causes and consequences, and we know how to solve the problem. Yet policy-makers keep rearranging the deck chairs. Left unattended, this broad environmental/humanitarian crisis will foreclose any hope for security in the world.
Some of the key indicators of our current condition help put these relative risks in perspective.
Population
The population -- growing by 74 million a year -- is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, the additional billions coming almost exclusively in the poorest countries.
The largest generation of young people ever, some 1.7 billion ages 10 to 24, is just now reaching reproductive age.
Consumption
Studies estimate that, if the developing world were to consume at the rate of the USA, another five or six planets would be needed to sustain this level of consumption.
Rich-poor divide
The gap in per-capita income between rich and poor nations has doubled in the past 40 years. The world's 350 billionaires have a combined net worth exceeding that of the poorest 2.5 billion people. Those poor live on less than $2 a day and lack basic sanitation, health care, clean water and adequate food.
Despite unprecedented economic expansion of the '90s, today some 900 million adults are illiterate and 30,000 kids die every day from preventable causes.
Biodiversity
Ecologists fear we are losing between 50 and 150 species each day, a rate thousands of times higher than the evolutionary background extinction rate of about one species a year. Iif present trends continue, half of all species on Earth would be extinct in the next 50 years.
Forests
Half of Earth's original forest cover is gone, and an additional 30 percent is degraded or fragmented. Only 20 percent of the original forest on Earth remains today, and half of this forest is threatened by human activity, mostly by logging.
Food
Today about 1 billion people are undernourished. More than 6 million people a year, mostly children, die from malnutrition. Grain production is declining and environmentally damaging meat production continues to increase. The 1.3 billion cattle (weighing more than all of humanity) have degraded a quarter of the planet's land surface.
Water
Two billion people have no choice but to drink water contaminated with human and animal waste and chemical pollution.
The World Health Organization estimates there are 1.5 billion cases of diarrhea a year in children from contaminated water, causing 3 million deaths.
The world lost half of its wetlands in the past century, and more than 22,000 square miles of arable land turns into desert each year. It's projected that in 20 years, the demand for water will increase by 50 percent and two-thirds of the world population will be water-stressed.
Atmosphere
Some 5,000 people a day die from air pollution, and kids in some cities inhale the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes every day just by breathing the air.
Global warming is no longer seriously doubted. The warming has accelerated the melting of polar ice caps and mountain glaciers; a rising sea level has inundated some Pacific islands, and more frequent and severe droughts, storms and floods cost more than $50 billion and 20,000 lives a year.
Oceans
The Earth's oceans are more polluted and overexploited than at any other time in history. Seventy percent of world fish populations are either overfished or nearly so. Marine pollution has increased dramatically, and warming ocean temperatures have killed more than a fourth of the world's coral reefs. The 1998 coral "bleaching" event killed almost half of all Indian Ocean corals in just a few months
The fate of the Earth may well be decided in our lifetime, and we all should begin behaving as though we are living together on one small, precious, life-sustaining spaceship, which indeed we are.
The solution is straightforward -- stabilize population, reduce consumption and share wealth. We know exactly how to do this; we just need to pay for it.
The United Nations says $40 billion a year -- about what consumers spend on cosmetics -- would provide everyone on Earth with clean water, sanitation, health care, adequate nutrition and education.
The secretary general of the 1992 Earth Summit cautioned, "no place on the planet can remain an island of affluence in a sea of misery ... we're either going to save the whole world or no one will be saved."
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