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.
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005