Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise

3. Windows on the World

3 Windows on the World There is not merely irritation now with the environmental problems of daily life—there is a growing fear that what the scientists have been saying is all too true, that man is on the way to defining the terms of his own extinction. —1970 It is the challenge and responsibility of every nation to conscientiously seek sustainability to the extent feasible within its own borders. The evidence to date is unmistakable that the environmental damage is serious and mounts day by day. The deterioration is taking shape around the globe—appearing in the form of species extinctions, global climate change, the collapse of ocean fisheries, and more. All of this is happening here and now. The gravity of these threats is such that within the last decade, the United Nations has held several international conferences to address these most critical problems of our time. The first, the 1992 Earth Summit, saw some 47,000 people around the globe converge on Rio de Janeiro seeking a way to better balance environmental protection and economic development. The Rio summit delivered a powerful message to the world when the participating nations proclaimed: “Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.” But the message was not without hope. The summit underscored the importance of working toward a sustainable world in which concern for the environment and development are adequately weighed and 23 balanced. International conferences—in Cairo, Egypt, in 1994 and Kyoto, Japan, in 1997—built on the Rio summit by focusing on the problems of world population growth and global climate change. Sustainable living again was the prescribed tool, an alternative to our current system of measuring progress on the basis of economic growth. We in the United States can meet this challenge, given effective political leadership and the will to succeed. Clearly, no nation can achieve this goal entirely on its own, but we can go a long way toward achieving sustainability within our own borders. We cannot wait; we must move now to address those questions we have the knowledge to address. We are fortunate to live in an era of unprecedented wealth. But we should be mindful that this prosperity comes at a price. The goods we buy, the products we sell, all have their roots in nature’s stores. Wood, soil, water, minerals, plants, and fossil fuels are the building blocks of our economy, yet these resources are not of our design. Humans have been exploiting Earth’s resources for as long as they have walked the planet. But this exploitation has been accelerating in the last one hundred years at a tremendous pace. It has been only in relatively recent times that we’ve learned to dam large rivers to create power and burn fossil fuels to make electricity; to create plastics from petroleum; to fission atoms to make nuclear power. Put these innovations against the vastness of Earth’s geologic time, reaching back billions of years, and one begins to sense the limited experience we have with the side effects of our progress. For many, today’s global problems seem fractured, unrelated, and unavoidable. They aren’t. Human population growth and activity are at the heart of most of the problems, and we have both the ability and responsibility to address them. If those for whom environmental issues remain something of a mystery could see the world’s ecological ills broadly outlined in one place, with the relationships drawn like a connect-the-dots puzzle, they would begin to comprehend the whole of the problem. Without this understanding, the public cannot fully fathom the magnitude of what is at work, or at stake. Without it, people are vulnerable to false claims of global health by those who stand to profit from its resources. Without it, people find refuge in the possibility that hidden in those murky aspects of environmental issues they don’t quite grasp lie 24 IMPERILED PLANET answers that would put the problems into proper perspective. Ignorance , in this case, is indeed bliss. I don’t have the expertise to explain the world’s environmental troubles. But I can point to the growing body of evidence gathered thus far by experts. Let...