File spoon-archives/anarchy-list.archive/anarchy-list_2000/anarchy-list.0001, message 299


Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 12:17:12 -0500
From: Chuck0 <chuck-AT-tao.ca>
Subject: Fwd: Earth Going Bad


More reasons to trash Starbucks.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Earth Going Bad
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 10:11:21 -0500


Environmentalists: Earth Going Bad
By PAULINE JELINEK Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The rise of the Internet and soaring stock markets
threaten to obscure ``real-world'' troubles such as crises in water
supplies
and other resources, an environmental group said Saturday.

``Global economic trends during the 1990s were remarkably bullish, but
environmental trends were disastrous,'' Worldwatch Institute said in its
State of the World 2000 report.

The report noted that the 20th century brought spectacular technological
achievements, boosted employment and helped fuel America's longest
peacetime
economic expansion.

But, it said, the expanding global economy is outgrowing Earth's
ecosystems.

``As the Dow Jones goes up, the Earth's health goes down,'' said Lester
R.
Brown, the study's lead author and president of Worldwatch.

Since Worldwatch started its annual assessments in 1984, its list of
troublesome trends - shrinking forests, falling water tables,
disappearing
plant and animal species - has lengthened to include rising
temperatures,
melting glaciers, more destructive storms, dying coral reefs.

``Caught up in the growth of the Internet, we seem to have lost sight of
the
Earth's deteriorating health,'' Brown said. ``It would be a mistake to
confuse the vibrancy of the virtual world with the increasingly troubled
state of the real world.''

Failure to reverse environmental trends will lead to reversals in
economic
progress, the group warned in the 200-page report.

It said protests against the World Trade Organization last month in
Seattle
made ``some progress'' in challenging the idea of ``economics at the
expense
of the environment and other issues.''

Decline already has started in Africa, where AIDS is sending millions to
early deaths, draining the already impoverished continent of scholars,
workers and farmers. The disease has caused a rapid drop in life
expectancy
in sub-Saharan Africa, a primary indicator for measuring progress,
Worldwatch said.

``Economic euphoria may lead us to ignore trends that have the potential
to
reverse progress,'' Brown said. ``While the world economy is booming,
the
HIV epidemic is devastating sub-Saharan Africa, a region of 800 million
people.''

India is pumping underground water faster than it can be replenished,
threatening a drop in water tables, irrigation supplies and food
production,
Worldwatch said.

``Unless New Delhi can quickly devise an effective strategy to deal with
spreading water scarcity, India - like Africa - may soon face a decline
in
life expectancy,'' it said.

Two big challenges of the new century are to stabilize climate and
population, with each family, for instance, having only two children,
the
report said.

Two dozen industrial countries have reached population stability, and
several developing countries are judged to be approaching it, including
China, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Barbados.

Stabilizing climate will mean replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar
cells
and other renewable sources of energy, the report said. It said the
world
gets one-fifth of its electricity from hydropower, and harnessing the
wind
has even greater potential as an energy source.

Worldwatch said restructuring economic policy-making to incorporate
environmental issues will not be easy.

``The gap between economists and ecologists in their perception of the
world
as the new century begins could not be wider,'' the report said.

Economists see a world economy that has grown by leaps and bounds in the
past 50 years. Ecologists see growth based on the burning of vast
quantities
of fossil fuels, which destabilizes the climate, rather than using
clean,
renewable sources.

   

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