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Information Economy Boom Obscuring Earth's Decline The Worldwatch Institute warned in its annual 'State of the World' report for the year 2000 that good economic news was deflecting public attention from grave environmental problems. By Worldwatch Institute Start Date: 1/25/00 Worldwatch News (Jan 15, 2000) -- The fast-evolving information economy is affecting every facet of our lives, but it is environmental trends that will ultimately shape the new century, says the Worldwatch Institute in "State of the World 2000", its first report in the new millennium. In the United States, the rapidly growing information economy has created millions of jobs and helped drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average of stocks from less than 3,000 in early 1990 to over 11,000 in 1999. "Caught up in the growth of the Internet," said senior author Lester Brown, "we seem to have lost sight of the Earth's deteriorating health. It would be a mistake to confuse the vibrancy of the virtual world with the increasingly troubled state of the real world." "When we launched this series of annual assessments in 1984, we hoped that we could begin the next century with an upbeat report, one that would show the Earth's health improving," said Brown. "But unfortunately the list of trends we were concerned with then -- shrinking forests, eroding soils, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, and disappearing species -- has since lengthened to include rising temperatures, more destructive storms, dying coral reefs, and melting glaciers. As the Dow Jones goes up, the Earth's health goes down." The biological impoverishment of the Earth is accelerating as human population grows. The share of bird, mammal, and fish species that are now in danger of extinction is in double digits -- 11 percent of all bird species, 25 percent of mammals, and 34 percent of fish. Local ecosystems start to collapse when rising human demands on them become excessive. Soil erosion has forced Kazakhstan to abandon half its cropland since 1980. The Philippines and Ivory Coast have lost their once luxuriant stands of tropical hardwoods, and the thriving forest product export industries that were based on them. In the United States, the rich oyster beds of the Chesapeake Bay that yielded over 70 million kilograms per year a century ago produced less than 2 million kilograms in 1998. And still the pressures build. The projected growth of world population from 6 billion at present to nearly 9 billion by 2050 will exacerbate nearly all environmental problems, especially since almost all this growth will come in the developing world where countries are already struggling to manage the effects of their rapidly growing populations. Another trend affecting the entire world is rising temperature. Record-setting temperatures in the 1990s are part of a twentieth-century warming trend. Just over the last three decades (between 1969-71 and 1996-98), global average temperature has risen by 0.44 degrees Celsius (0.8 degrees Fahrenheit). In the 21st century, temperature is projected to rise even faster. Rising temperatures are melting glaciers from the Peruvian Andes to the Swiss Alps. The two ice shelves on either side of the Antarctic peninsula are retreating. Signs of melting are everywhere. In late 1991, hikers in the southwestern Alps discovered an intact human body protruding from a glacier. Apparently trapped in a storm some 5,000 years ago and quickly covered with snow and ice, his body was remarkably well preserved. In 1999, another body was found in a melting glacier in the Yukon Territory of western Canada. "Our ancestors are emerging from the ice with a message for us: The Earth is getting warmer," said Brown. One of the less visible trends shaping our future is falling water tables. Although irrigation problems such as waterlogging, salting, and silting go back several thousand years, aquifer depletion is new, confined largely to the last half-century, when powerful diesel and electric pumps made it possible to extract underground water far faster than the natural recharge from rain and snow. Report co-author Sandra Postel estimates that the worldwide overpumping of aquifers, which is concentrated in China, India, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States, exceeds 160 billion tons of water per year. Since it takes roughly 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, this overpumping is the equivalent of 160 million tons of grain, or half the U.S. grain harvest. In consumption terms, the food supply of 480 million of the world's 6 billion people is being produced with the unsustainable use of water. If all countries stabilized water tables this year by eliminating overpumping, the world grain harvest would fall by roughly 160 million tons, driving grain prices off the top of the chart. "Environmental decline is often seen as gradual and predictable, but if we assume this, we are sleepwalking through history," said report co-author Chris Bright. "As pressures on the Earth's natural systems build, there may be some disconcerting surprises as trends interact, reinforcing each other and triggering abrupt changes." For example, in October 1998, Hurricane Mitch slammed into Central America and stalled for more than a week. Nightmarish mudslides obliterated entire villages; 10,000 people died; half the population of Honduras was displaced and the country lost 95 percent of its crops. Mitch was the fourth strongest hurricane to enter the Caribbean this century, but much of the damage was caused by deforestation. If forests had been gripping the soil on those hills, fewer villages would have been buried in mudslides. "The two big challenges in this new century are to stabilize climate and population," said Brown. "If we cannot stabilize both, there is not an ecosystem on Earth that we can save. Everything will change. If we can stabilize population and climate, other environmental problems will be much more manageable." Stabilizing population quickly depends on couples holding the line at two surviving children -- an achievable goal. Some 34 industrial countries have already reached population stability, and several developing countries are approaching it, including Barbados, China, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. We know the keys to stabilizing population: providing universal access to family planning services and educating girls and women. Stabilizing climate means replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar cells, and other renewables. Today the world gets a fifth of its electricity from hydropower, but this source is dwarfed by the potential of wind. Three U.S. states -- North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas -- have enough harnessable wind energy to supply national electricity needs. China could double its current generation of electricity using only wind. Restructuring economic policymaking to incorporate environmental issues will not be easy. "The scale and urgency of the challenges facing us in this century are unprecedented," said Brown. "We cannot overestimate the urgency of stabilizing the relationship between ourselves, now 6 billion in number, and the natural systems on which we depend. If we continue the irreversible destruction of these systems, our grandchildren will never forgive us. As the report notes, 'Nature has no reset button.'" [For more information, contact the Worldwatch Institute, 1776 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC 20036. Phone 202 452-1999, email worldwatch@worldwatch.org, web http://www.worldwatch.org]
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