State of the World 1998. Lester Brown, Christopher Flavin & Hilary French. Worldwatch Institute, Norton & Company 1998.
I don't claim to look forward to Worldwatch's State of the World when it makes it annual trek to my mailbox. I get affected in negative ways by disturbing news. But at least it does behoove me to at least glance at it -- after all, what kind of environmental editor/writer would I be if I have my head in the sand all the time? Is not the role of the environmentalist to keep one's lookout? To spread the sobering truth far and wide across the land while dodging the land mines of the polluters? To try and avoid martyrdom at the hands of those who may be motivated to kill the messenger?
The folks at Worldwatch usually can take some pretty sobering news and make it into dry factual reading without judgement. This tends to make it less alarming - after all if these folks know all this very bad environmental stuff and are not out in the streets shouting and yelling, then things must not be all that bad. So as the frog being slowly cooked to death by a very gradual increase in the temperature of the water he is sitting in, so we can inure ourselves to ever more sobering news. Well, I have used the term "sobering" twice already and I don't like it. It is hedging one's bets on a term which really is a euphemism for "catastrophic." But I won't use the term catastrophic quite yet. Like the foolish frog and most of humanity, I am waiting for things to get really, really bad (and the poor frog never did get to croak out his alarm until he was "croaked" by being cooked!).
And how can things be so bad anyway? The stock market is going through the ceiling, and no people in history has ever had anywhere near the gadgets and things to play with that we have now. TVs and VCRs and computers and cellular phones and sports utility vehicles. That's right folks -- sports utility vehicles that get about 20 miles for a gallon of gasoline road driving
This having so many things to play with is true in most households anyway - in the U. S. of A. anyway -- and we do need to leave the homeless and illegal immigrants out of this statistic since they either don't vote or aren't household holders or both.
In other parts of the world the dismal state of affairs is more on a day to day all around level rather than things on CNN. Lester Brown goes after us right from the start in his Forward.
"...In recent months, a plume of smoke larger than the continental United States has spread across Southeast Asia, turning the skies dark, and leaving at least 20 million people choking on air that has become a toxic soup, killing hundreds outright..."
So what has this to do with us? - let those foolish folks stew in their own juices, rather, plume of smoke. Problem is, multinational corporations, many with primary bases in the U. S., have been behind much of the ravishment of the lands there in the name of greed. We cannot close our eyes to this - sooner or late, and perhaps much sooner - we here will be paying the piper for this.
The book covers the waterfront, and the land front, too, I would say.
Chapter One: The Future of Growth ("The idealogy of growth has permeated every corner of the globe"). In most countries this growth is completely unsustainable and systems are crashing down like dominos. Multinational timber corporations having raped and pillaged much of Southeast Asia are now descending on Latin America for their booty. Costa Rica, once a world prize as a relatively untouched natural area is now in the process of being ravished. ("In effect, we are behaving as if we have no children, as if there will not be a next generation')
Chapter Two: Sustaining the World's Forests ("Governments often look to their forests as a standing asset that can be liquidated to solve financial problems"). The Earth's forests are rapidly being cleared, not necessarily for timber, but to make room for growing beef cattle, other food crops or for habitation. Only a third of some very valuable timber in the Amazon is made into lumber, the rest is burned for firewood or just burned to get it out of the way.
Closer to home in North America, areas forty or so years ago that were mostly just Canadian wilderness, the stuff of romantic novels and adventure, have been outrageously plundered. Two-thirds of Canada's Pacific coastal rainforest has been degraded by logging and development.
What has happened in West Virginia for the last hundred years is happening on a world-wide scale, and the story is the same. Powerful interests are able to shape or ignore government policy by legal or illegal means, through corruption and favoritism. (Somehow the fact that these shenanigans are pretty universal is no solace to me at all!)
Chapter Three: Losing Strands in theWeb of Life ("All lowland Hawaiian songbirds are now nonnative species introduced by humans"). This chapter is bleaker still - The wood thrush's rarity at my place here when it was very common only eight years ago is part of the overall picture of vanishing wildlife.
At present one in every four mammals is in danger of extinction. We suspect an even worse prognosis for the reptiles and amphibians, but we are stymied by not having most of the world's species catalogued. Therefore it is hard to come up with blanket numbers of those in decline.
The darkest scene of all is in the oceans where many food fish species common forty years ago are so rare as to be thought close to extinction.
There are seven more chapters some describing further mayhem to the Earth and her species and climate, and some attempting to provide some kind of way we can head off this unfolding catastrophe (yes, I finally did use that word - it is the only one really appropriate to point to what is happening, or may be about to happen, to the human species, done in by their own kind, and taking all other living systems on Earth with them).
In "Struggling to Raise Cropland Productivity" we learn that the boost to agriculture from commercial fertilizers and pesticides that has taken place over the past four decades is now reversing itself because of insect resistance to disease and the vulnerability of varietal monoculture to insect and disease attack. The loss of genetic variability through the development "wonder" varieties which have captured most of the commercial growing market has created short term gains and staggering losses in some cases for the longer term.
The continuing and devastating loss of topsoil in the undeveloped nations has been another factor in diminishing productivity.
For the first time, as the needs of food for population increases soar, the world is depleting its stores of grain and food productivity is going down.
With all this bad news to report, we have not as yet mentioned the hot item of discussion these day, global warming. The rate of change in warming is the fastest in 10,000 years, making it unlikely that living organisms will have time to make readjustments to such changes. "...Scientists around the world have concluded that flooded cities, diminished food production, and increased storm damage all seem likely - and could well produce catastrophic [there's that word again!] economic consequences. Whatever the outcomes are, they could take centuries to reverse, and could affect the lives of billions of people." Factor in unprecedented floods, more storms like the disastrous ice storm in eastern Canada or the two back-to-back record breaking snowfalls in Beckley, both of this year. More strange phenomenon like the El Nino one of this year on which so many bizarre and economically costly weather conditions are most likely to occur.
The ultimate travesty appears to be having intellectually challenged people as leaders at this critical time. When you have persons in the office of governor, or legislative house speakers, or CEOs of electric utility corporations in nation, region and state, who work in opposition to a solution to this burgeoning problem, it is difficult to find any reason for optimism at all.
The idea is that if we do all the right things now, perhaps it is not too late to prevent this looming catastrophe, but human beings have never as yet had any such consensus to do this. Too many ignoramuses, too many into denial, too many only selfishly interested in what they can get for themselves now.
For the rest of us, perhaps the only thing we have left is environmental despair. I prefer to follow the advice of Raphael Ezekial, "The cure for environmental despair is environmental activism." (Review by Bill Reed)