While we're off fighting terror, the planet's crumbling
By Professor Richard Steiner

History has shown that human societies often misjudge risk, and that is the case today. With world attention focused almost exclusively on terrorism and Iraq, another, even more serious security threat deepens -- the global environmental/humanitarian crisis.

While we remain virtually hypnotized by terrorism, humanity is quietly destroying the biosphere in which we live, ourselves and our future along with it. Just since 9/11, 25 million children died from preventable causes, the world's population grew by 200 million people and thousands of species went extinct. Also, 250,000 square miles of forest were lost, 50,000 square miles of arable land turned to desert, 8 billion tons of carbon were added to the atmosphere and air pollution claimed more than 4 million lives.

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. Certainly we must address terrorism, but just as certainly we must ensure our planet's sustainability.

Some of the key indicators of our current condition help put these relative risks in perspective.

Population

World population stands at 6.4 billion, more than four times its number at the start of the 20th century. Although some nations have reached population stability, many of the poorest, developing nations are far from it. 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. Where fertility remains high there is widespread poverty, discrimination against women, high infant mortality and lack of access to family planning, health care and education. More than 350 million women lack any access to family planning. Some religions oppose contraception, and female infanticide has become epidemic. Programs to stabilize population need about $20 billion a year (about one week's worth of world military expenditures) but now receive about $3 billion a year.

Consumption

Conspicuous consumption has become a homogenizing force across the developed world. Just since 1950, we have consumed more goods and services than all previous generations combined. The consumption of energy, steel and timber more than doubled; fossil fuel use and car ownership increased four-fold; meat production and fish catch increased five-fold; paper use increased six-fold, and air travel increased 100-fold.

In the United States, where malls are more prevalent than high schools, shopping has become the primary cultural activity. Although world economic output continues to increase, when real costs are calculated, sustainable economic welfare has been in decline since the '70s. One measure of resource consumption of humanity -- our "ecological footprint" -- surpassed sustainable levels in the late '70s, and for an average American is now 20 times that of a person in some developing countries.

Studies estimate that, if the developing world were to consume at our rate, another five or six planets would be needed to sustain this level of consumption. The United Nations says that a 10-fold reduction in resource consumption (or a 10-fold increase in energy/material efficiency) in industrialized countries will be needed for adequate resources to be available for developing countries.

Rich-poor divide

The unequal distribution of consumption adds to environmental, social and economic damage as well. The gap in per-capita income between rich and poor nations has doubled in the past 40 years. The upper 20 percent in economic class -- Europe, Japan, North America -- account for more than 80 percent of the material and energy consumed globally while the poorest 20 percent account for just 1 percent of consumption. 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. Poor countries pay more than $350 billion a year just to service the interest on their debt to developed countries (a total of $2.4 trillion) and often try to raise this money through environmentally destructive activities. Some countries spend more to service their foreign debt than on education and health care combined.

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. Some estimate that we have lost perhaps 600,000 species since the "biotic holocaust" began around 1950; if present trends continue, half of all species on Earth would be extinct in the next 50 years. Overhunting, invasive species, pollution and climate change are factors in this sixth mass extinction event, but by far the greatest cause is habitat loss. The lost ecological services could be devastating. It may take 5 million to 10 million years for biological diversity to recover.

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 as large, relatively undisturbed "frontier forests." And half of this frontier forest is threatened by human activity, mostly by logging. Another 100,000 square miles of forest is lost each year, mostly in the tropics, and only a very small amount of this forest loss is offset by regrowth.

Since 1960, about 30 percent of the Earth's tropical forests have disappeared and with them, thousands of species. Between 50 percent and 90 percent of the terrestrial species inhabit and depend upon the forests, and more than half of the threatened vertebrate species on Earth are forest animals. The link is clear: lose forests -- lose species.