Environment 97/98

, by Allen, John L.

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ISBN: 9780697372666 | 0697372669
Cover: Paperback
Copyright: 3/1/1997

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To The Reader

Topic Guide

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UNIT 1 The Global Environment: An Emerging World View Five selections provide information on the current state of Earth and the changes we will face.

Overview

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1. Computing the Risks: A Global Overview of Our Most-Pressing Environmental challenges, Don Hinrichsen, Inter-national Wildlife, March/April 1996. The international scientific community often seems hopelessly di-vided over fundamental environmental issues: climate change and its effects, the loss of biodiversity, and decreasing agricultural pro-ductivity. In spite of the conflicting opinions, some patterns have emerged, including what may be the unifying theory of environ-mental problems: population growth.

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2. Thought for the Morrow: Cumulative Threats to the En-vironment, Gordon H. Orians, Environment, September 1995. Some cumulative threats such as ozone depletion and global warm-ing have received much attention from both the scientific community and the public, Other threats, such as the loss of biodiversity, land-scape modification, and the cumulative changes in biogeochemical cycles deserve more attention from both scientists and policy makers.

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3. Ecosocietal Restoration: Reestablishing Humanity's Rela-tionship with Natural Systems, John Cairns Jr., Environment, June 1995. Human society has evolved together with natural systems and has always modified those systems. But increased population and tech-nology have created imbalances in the relationship between humans and the environment. What is required is ecological restoration through modification of environmental attitudes and control of population and technology.

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4. Carrying Capacity: Earth's Bottom Line, Sandra Postel, Challenge, March/April 1994. Human societies have failed to discriminate between the kinds of technology that meet the needs of a sustainable society and those that harm Earth. The solution lies in the creativity and energy of people from all walks of life to join in the urgent mission of halting Earth's environmental decline.

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5. Forging a New Global Partnership to Save the Earth, Hilary F. French, USA Today Magazine (Society for the Advance-ment of Education), May 1995. Many of the development and economic issues that cause environ-mental deterioration are worsening. An international effort to stabi-lize the planet must be made before deterioration reaches a point that becomes irreversible.

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UNIT 2 The World's Population: People and Hunger Six selections examine the problems the world will have in feeding its ever-increasing population.

Overview

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6. How Many People Can the Earth Support? Joel E. Cohen, The Sciences, November/December 1995. The biological concept of carrying capacity provides an estimate of how many people can be supported in a given environment at a given level of technology. When estimating the ability of Earth to support a human population, however, social, cultural, economic, and political choices are as important as environmental constraints on population size.

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7. Reassessing the Earth's Population, Lester R. Brown, Society, May/June 1995. The Output of food from farms and the sea can no longer keep pace with population growth. New information on the carrying capacity of both land and oceanic food systems argues for a reevaluation of population policies. The population growth that has slowed humanity's progress is now reversing it.

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8. Facing Food Scarcity, Lester R. Brown, World Watch, Novem-ber/December 1995. In a world where population growth continues and the stocks of grain and other food reserves diminish, the greatest challenge to humanity may soon be just making it to the next harvest. The challenge for the world's leaders is to achieve a balance between people and food on a crowded planet.

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9. Population, Poverty, and the Local Environment, Partha S. Dasgupta, Scientific American, February 1995. As resources, including water and wood, become more scarce in agricultural areas of the developing world, more children are needed to aid in resource extraction. The demand for larger rural families places greater pressure on marginal resources, further increasing the need for children in a cycle of increasing poverty, population, and environmental damage.

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10. Growing More Food, Doing Less Damage, Mark W. Rosegrant and Robert Livernash, Environment, September 1996. Increasing the intensity of agriculture has been clearly successful in raising food production in developing countries. But production in-creases have imposed heavy environmental costs. While there are reasons to believe that food production can be increased even more, efforts to do so must include methods of lessening the environmental impact of farming.

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11. Another Agricultural Revolution, Howard Rudnitsky, Forbes, May 20, 1996. The world on the brink of a major agricultural revolution as genetic engineering begins to transform farming. Already available are ge-netically altered seeds that reduce the need to spray agricultural chemicals to control insects and other pests and produce plants that yield more per unit of land area.

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UNIT 3 Energy: Present and Future Problems Five articles consider the problems of meeting present and future energy needs. Alternative energy sources are also examined.

Overview

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12. Renewable Energy Technology: An Urgent Need, a Hard Sell, Keith Lee Kozloff, Environment, November 1994. Compared to other energy technologies, renewable energy generates far less invironmental impact. Yet biomass, wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric energy currently supply only 9 percent of U.S. energy requirements. A shift toward renewable energy would curb both conventional air pollution and the environmental damage that results from mining, transporting, and burning fossil fuels.

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13. Power Shock: The Next Energy Revolution, Chirstopher Flavin, World Watch, January/February 1996. Many energy experts think that the old fossil fuel-based energy sys-tems will not change rapidly. However, developments in many parts of the world are already proving them wrong. A major transition may be occurring as new modular, mass-produced energy systems based on sustainable energy resources enter the market and replace costlier and less flexible traditional energy systems.

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14. Mideast Oil Forever? Joseph J. Romm and Charles B. Curtis, The Atlantic Monthly, April 1996. The United States has taken the lead in new energy technology that could generate jobs, reduce environmental degradation, and limit American dependency on fossil fuels from the unstable Persian Gulf region. Unfortunately, congressional action during the past year threatens to end America's leadership in the development of renew-able energy systems.

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15. Meltdown, Nicholas Lenssen and Christopher Flavin, World Watch, May/June 1996. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 brought death, pain, and debilitating disease to millions. According to the authors, the chernobyl accident also brought the fast-growing nu-clear electric industry to a standstill from which it will never recover, thus paving the way for the rapid growth of renewable energy tech-nology.

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16. Improving Energy Efficiency: Making a "NoRegrets" Option Work, Thomas J. Wilbanks, Environment, November 1994. Recent efforts to improve energy efficiency have been based on "no-regrets" options: actions that benefit the environment and aid economic development without requiring painful sacrifices for developed or developing countries. Thomas Wilbanks reports that the relative success of such options suggests they should be the basis for future energy policies.

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UNIT 4 Biosphere: Endangered Species Eight articles examine the problems in the world's biosphere. Not only are plants and animals endangered, but so are many human groups who are disastrously affected by deforestation and primitive agricultural policies.

Overview

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17. Biodiversity since Rio: The Future of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Kal Raustiala and David G. Victor, Environment, May 1996. Loss of biodiversity, or the variability among living organisms, may pose the world's greatest ecological danger. In recognition of that danger, most of the world's countries have agreed to the 1992 Con-vention on Biological Diversity. Since then, however, the biodiversity agenda has expanded to include such concerns as access to genetic resources and biotechnology.

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18. What's Wrong with the Endangered Species Act? Not Much-and Here's Why, T. H. Watkins, Audubon, Janu-ary/February 1996. All major environmental laws have tended to become symbols that opponents of the environmental movement have used to discredit conservation and preservation efforts as being harmful to economic growth. T. H. Watkins maintains that a prime example of this process has been recent efforts in Congresss to cripple the Endangered Species Act.

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A. PLANTS

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19. Rain Forest Entrepreneurs: Cashing In on Conservation, Thomas A. Carr, Heather L. Pedersen, and Sunder Ramaswamy, Environment, September 1993. Worldwide, deforestation portends serious environmental Consequences, including the reduction of biodiversity and an increase in global warming. Although the primary reasons for forest clearance are rooted in economics, mounting evidence suggests that deforestation is not only ecologically devastating but economically unsound

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20. An Explosion of Green, Bill McKibben, The Atlantic Monthly, April 1995. The reforestation of the eastern United States is partly the result of conservation efforts and partly the result of accident. But the region's forest recovery can show the developing world how to make room for people, farming, industry, and endongered species and still main-tain a viable ecosystem.

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21. Flames of Destruction-and Renewal, Dan Marshall, The World & 1, July 1996. The message of Smokey Bear's forest fire prevention advertisements is undeniably important, but the implication that all forest fires should be stopped is misleading, reports Dan Marshall. In healthy forests, fire often plays the important role of keeping the forest free of litter. Fire prevention programs allow fuel to accumulate to the point that fires become massive conflagrations rather than relatively benign environmental events.

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B. ANIMALS

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22. A Time of Catastrophic Extinction: What We Must Do, Peter Raven, The Futurist, September/October 1995. Animal and plant species will likely become extinct at the rate of 50,000 species a year during the next few decades. This will be the greatest mass extinction since the die-off of the dinosaurs. Of all global problems, this one is moving the most rapidly and has the greatest consequences. Extinctions and the loss of biodiversity are completely irreversible.

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23. Seeking Refuge, Ted Williams, Audubon, May/June 1996. The national wildlife refuge system in the United States comprises a land area that is larger than that of America's national parks. Protecting wildlife to the exculsion of other uses has never been a purpose of the refuge system, maintains Ted Williams, and wildlife concerns are often ignored in favor of outdoor recreation, agriculture, and resource extraction.

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24. Twilight of the Cod, Robert Kunzig, Discover, April 1995. The North Atlantic cod was once the symbol of the environmental abundance of the New World. But the advent of industrial fishing technology over the last hundred years has brought the apparently endless resource to the brink of extinction. Many fishermen blame the demise of the cod on pollution or gloabl warming-on everything but the fact that fish were caught more rapidly than they could reproduce.

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Resources: Land, Water, and Air Six selections discuss the environmental problems, affecting our land, water, and air resources.

Overview

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A. LAND

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25. Stopping the Dry Destruction, International Agricultural Development, March/April 1994. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), desertification is one of the most serious global environmetal problems. The problem is not the spread of deserts but the slow and steady deterioration of the world's vast dryland areas that support grazing, grain cultivation, and one-sixth of the world's population.

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26. Assault of the Earth, Elena Wilken, World Watch, March/April 1995. The world's supply of productive soil is dwindling as a result of intensive farming. Virtually all of the world's most fertile farmland is already in cultivation. As population grows, farmers will have to increase their yields, and this cannot be done without increasing already severe problems of soil depletion.

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B. WATER

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27. Dying Seas, Anne E. Platt, World Watch, January/February 1995. Human civilization has always tended to cluster around the land-enclosed seas that provided easy transportation, food, and land rich with topsoil. In the last few decades, the growth of waterside civi-lization has accelerated to the point that the qualities that make the seas valuable-particularly their food production-are threatened.

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28. As the World Runs Dry ... Next, Wars Over Water? World Press Review, November 1995. As farmers, factory owners, and thirsty citizens compete for water, so do their governments, perhaps to the point of war, according to a recent World Bank report. The conflict is between those who view water rights as fundamental to human society and deplore any ef-forts to raise water prices or divert water supplies from the poor, and those who argue that there is plenty for all if sensible water management is practiced and water is priced so as to encourage conservation.

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C. AIR

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29. Has Global Warming Begun? Shawna Vogel, Earth, Decem-ber 1995. Scientists continue to debate the question of whether human activi-ties can heighten the greenhouse effect of Earth's atmosphere and produce global warming. Over the last few years, says Shawna Vogel, evidence is accumulating that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and other gases produced by human activities do affect the global climate.

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30. A Sky Full of Holes: Why the Ozone Layer Is Torn Worse than Ever, Mark Dowie, The Nation, July 8, 1996. The breakdown of startospheric ozone and the formation of holes in the ozone layer was believed to be an environmental problem that had been fixed by reduction in the use of the chlorofluorocar-bons, or CFCs. Recent evidence suggests that the problem of ozone depletion is still with us, and new chemical culprits such as methyl bromide are being identified as ozone-destroying agents just as dam-aging as CFCs.

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UNIT 6 Pollution: The Hazards of Growth Five selections weigh the environmental impacts of the growth of human population.

Overview

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31. Who Gets Polluted? Ruth Rosen, Dissent, Spring 1994. Over the last decade, a movement for environmental justice has been spreading across urban America. The basis for the movement is the fact that impoverished racial groups in inner city locations have endured the highest levels of industrial pollution in the United States. Minority communities are challenging corporate and governmental environmental policies.

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32. A Down-to-Earth Approach to Clean Production, Nicholas Gertler and John R. Ehrenfeld, Technology Review, Febru-ary/March 1996. The practice of industrial symbiosis, modeled on the natural world where organisms rely on one another for nutrients, promises to substantially cut the environmental costs-and the economic costs as well-of manufacturing. The authors describe how the new industrial ecology offers ways to reduce traditional conflicts between economic development and environmental health.

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33. China Takes a Deep Breath, U.S. News & World Report, Sep-tember 9, 1996. After decades of unchecked economic growth, China now faces an environmental degradation problem of unprecedented magnitude as soil, water, and air pollution have risen to levels dangerous to human health. While there is some evidence that the Chinese bureaucracy is beginning to recognize the problems, economic development still remains of paramount importance.

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34. The River Ganges' Long Decline, Payal Sampat, World Watch, July/August 1996. The Ganges River, flowing through the heart of South Asia's most densely populated and heavily farmed region, has long been one of the world's most severe examples of water pollution, despite its above-average river purification characteristics. But past pollutant factors may pale in significance when compared with what the region's increasingly industrial future could bring.

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35. Environmental Nightmares: Russia's Total Mess, Jorg Al-brecht, Patricia Faller, Dick Kurbjuweit, and Walter Saller, World Press Review, February 1995. Post-Soviet Russia faces a host of intractable problems, but the biggest of all may be the ghastly environmental legacy of reckless Soviet industrialization and military buildup. Tons of atomic wastes and crumbling nuclear power plants are time bombs threatening disasters far greater than chernobyl-not just for Russia but for the entire world.

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Environmental Information Retrieval

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Glossary

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Index

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Article Review Form

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Article Rating Form

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Environment 97/98

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