Time for Healing:
The Case for Lessening the Human Footprint

Edward J. Dodson

[A presentation delivered at A Conference on the Future of Connecticut and Beyond, Bridgeport, Connecticut, July 2003]

In a few weeks, Lindy Davies and I will engage in a debate on the question of whether we ought to be concerned over the expanding human footprint around the globe. I hold to the view that the long-term health of the earth and the well-being of our own species requires us to take action to reduce our numbers. Further, I advocate adoption of public policies to encourage people in all societies to delay giving birth to children and to give birth to fewer children.

As I have periodically raised the population issue over the last decade, some members of the Georgist community have suggested my positions are anti-Georgist or, at best, neo-Malthusian. As a serious student of Henry George's works, I offer no challenge to George's refutation of the good Rev. Malthus. Rather, I pragmatically look at the pace and direction of change in our socio-political arrangements and institutions and join with those who conclude our opportunity for incremental movement toward the just society is far too slow. The probability is great that by our deepening footprint on the earth condemn future generations to a life of extreme misery and conflict. Although our understanding of political economy empowers us with knowledge of the measures that would cause the dominoes to fall in the right direction, our rent-seeking behavior has proven to be far more powerful than moral arguments. Few of history's great moral philosophers have grasped what Henry George so eloquently described as "the central truth" of how we need to organize our societies. In George's own words:

The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance. If that could be, it would have been accepted long ago. If that could be, it would never have been obscured. But it will find friends -- those who will toil for it; suffer for it; if need be, die for it. This is the power of Truth. Will it at length prevail? Ultimately, yes. But in our own times, or in times of which any memory of us remains, who shall say?1

The century that has passed since Henry George last wrote and spoke to the world has been a century of enormous changes. Our ability to convert nature into capital goods is such that there is no reason other than societal injustices why virtually every person does not have access to the goods of a decent human existence. However, what remains as a serious threat to the earth's capacity to continue to yield resources are the processes by which this conversion occurs.

For more than half of the twentieth century, the conversion of nature into capital goods occurred with almost no regard for the long-term destruction of ecosystems or what is today described as sustainability. Owners of large-scale industrial enterprises have seldom voluntarily reduced the extent to which their production activities polluted the air, water and land -- or destroyed the health of workers or the general populations exposed to their discharges. Until the last few decades, nearly all governments have behaved with equal or even worse disregard for the environment and for people. Although there are many examples of more enlightened behavior, pollution and inefficient resource utilization remain as global problems.

From the very beginning of the industrial revolution, the race was on: Would the conversion of nature into capital and consumption goods eventually make the earth uninhabitable? Or, would we discipline ourselves to live in harmony with the planet?

The first real attack on sustainability occurred when people cut down trees for fuel, for homes and for the ships built for commerce and warfare. The consumption of wood occurred at a rate natural processes were unable to counter. When the most resource-consuming societies began to run out of forests, they used force to gain control of new, forested territory. Europeans found their way to the Americas and to the largely untapped and nondegraded resources of a thinly-populated continent. The pattern of deforestation continues today even as some parts of the globe have again returned to a thick forest cover. We continue to grapple with how to balance the ongoing demand for wood and wood products, with the movement of people in forested areas highly vulnerable to periodic fires, and the needs of many animals for uninterrupted wilderness in order to survive.

Wherever the forests have disappeared, the diversity of life has suffered, soil fertiity has been destroyed, weather patterns have been altered, the quantity of fresh water has diminished and the delicate balances required to support life extensively disrupted.

Of an estimated 7 million plant and animal species on earth, about 85 percent live on land with about two-thirds of them in the tropics, mostly the rainforests. Prior to modern human influence, these forests covered approximately 16 million square kilometers. Today about 8 million remain. The current rate of forest loss is about 1 million square kilometers every 5 to 10 years and accelerating, with several times that area being damaged by fires and selective logging. At this pace, the tropical forests will be gone well before the end of the century, along with over half of all earth's species. And on closer inspection, the picture only gets worse.2

The optimist can look around at parts of the globe and point to successful reforestation efforts. These examples are occurring primarily where there is little pressure exerted by an expanding rural population to migrate onto marginal land.

Returning to history for a moment, we see that the discovery of huge coal reserves shifted extraction for fuel from harvesting trees to subsurface mining. Neither extractive activity was undertaken with the slightest concern for the future or for the well-being of people living in the immediate vicinity. The military-industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower warned about as he left the U.S. Presidency had been entrenched since the the middle of the nineteenth century. The primary task assigned to economists as they displaced political economists was to assist the State, its military arm and heavy industry in the process of resource allocation. The result was a developing world that almost everywhere resembled the mighty industrial center of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When Lincoln Steffens visited the city he described what he experienced this way:

I have never lost my first picture of Pittsburgh when I went there to write about it. It looked like hell, literally. ...The blast ovens opened periodically and threw their volcanic light upon the cloud of mist and smoke above the town and gilded the silver rivers...3

TThankfully, the air quality in Pittsburgh and most other cities in the United States is no longer thick with dark, particle-filled smoke. The Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland, Ohio no longer catches fire, as it did in 1969. The lakes, rivers or ocean waters adjacent to these industrial centers are no longer so polluted by toxic chemicals that all life has disappeared. People in many parts of the world have successfully pressured their governments to take action to improve conditions. Environmental activists often credit the beginning of organized resistance to environmental degradation by industry and government to the wake-up call provided in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Her warning helped to create the environmental movement. Rachel Carson declared that time was running out for us if we did not change the way we exploited the earth's resources:

It took millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth -- eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. ...Given time -- time not in years but in millennia -- life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.4

Environmentalists and environmental activists have made great strides. However, as the literature of the scientists constantly reminds us, there are clear signals that our efforts are far short of what is required for sustainability -- particularly in the face of a growing population forced by political circumstances to destroy the environment in order to survive day-to-day. This is not to suggest that population growth is the only or even the primary threat to our ecosystem. What I assert is that the growth in population exacerbates the problems we have.

What Does the Crisis Look Like?

There are now six billion of us, and we will be nine billion by the year 2050. There are twice the number of people alive today as there were in 1960. Thus, even with the few taking a disproportionate share of what is produced, the world's impoverished people are somehow living longer even as they continue to parent more than one child. But, at what cost to the earth? And, at what cost to the quality of life?

In places such as Bangladesh -- one of the most densely populated countries in the world -- 120 million people struggle in deep poverty. Their Pakistani neighbors have a population of 140 million people. Neither country is able to feed its people. Health care is not available for most of their populations, and the overwhelming majority of their populations are illiterate. And yet, Bangladesh is something of a success story where family planning is concerned. The average Pakistani woman bears an average of over five children. For women in Bangladesh the average is three. All across the Asian and African continents, the rate of popuation increase continues even as development efforts place greater and greater demands on the natural environment. The graph below puts a statistical face of global poverty. Without socio-political changes, hardship and deprivation will continue to be the destiny of hundreds of millions of people and the children they bring into this world.

Another serious problem is that governments in many developing countries are not providing basic health and sanitation services for their growing urban populations. Land monopoly and multinational exploitation of resource-laden lands has driven people from the land.

Is this the fate we are willing to accept for the millions of children yet to be born in so much of Africa, Asia, Central and South Amerca, or too many of the rural areas and urban neighborhoods of the United States?

URBAN SQUALOR

• The treatment and recycling of human waste is already a serious problem in many countries, particularly those with chronic water shortages. A World Bank analysis estimated that developing countries will need to spend $600 billion over the next two or three decades on water and sewer systems.
• Population centers in the developing world are already very crowded and unsanitary breeding rounds for deadly diseases: cholera, malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis, among the most dangerous.

We have not taken very much care to live in harmony with the Earth. We have settled in many places prone to frequent natural upheavals, and our collective actions (and inactions) have resulted exacerbated the destructive synergy of wind, rain, heat, drought, tornado, volcano, hurricane and monsoon. The enormity of our footprint -- and our exposure to disasters -- is shown by the chart below, which shows the dollar-denominated losses experienced since 1960.

AGRICULTURAL PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES

• While millions of people are starving or nearly so, agricultural production is dedicated to the feeding and raising of some 45 billion farm animals.
• After shifting huge areas of land from foodcrops to feed for animals, China has now become a major grain importing country.
• Across the U.S. sprawling suburbs are substantially limiting the amount of water filtering into the soil to recharge aquifers and provide underground flows to rivers and lakes.

ATMOSPHERIC CHANGES

The impact of our activities on the Earth's climate is not fully understood. There are many variables at play. One is that we are making very inconsistent use of the best scientific information and technologies. Under existing conditions, adding more people to the world's population stresses an already overstressed ecosystem.

• During the winter season in Antarctica, the hole in the ozone layer over the continent was larger than ever -- some 2.5 times the area of Europe.
• For the first half of 1998, the average temperature on the Earth reached the highest level ever recorded for any six-month period.
• The condensation trails from jet airliners can create long-lastingcloud covers. Scientists now believe that jets could be responsible for as much as half of the regional warming in the northern hemisphere generally attributed to greenhouse gases.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

• On average, a person living in one of the world's most developed societies consumes two and a half times the resources as someone in the developing world.
• Enough food is wasted each day in the United States to feed 26 million people.

DAMS ACROSS OUR RIVERS

• A dam constructed in 1972 on the Danube River has eliminated the flow the fresh water into the Black Sea and triggered a chain-reaction of devastation.
• The Tehri Dam on the Bhagirathi River in India, nearing completion, is construction in an area of serious geological instability and risk of earthquake.

DEFORESTATION

• Nitrogen oxides pumped into our air from auto exhaust and coal-burning power plants are creating layers of Ozone thick enough to kill forests in North America and anywhere where the automobile is relied upon as a primary form of transportation.
• Indonesia's rain forests are essentially destroyed.
• By 1998, many of the world's great rivers had lost at least half or more of their original adjacent forest cover, replaced by population centers, exposing the rivers to sediment inflow and frequent overflow into the surrounding countryside.
  

GLOBAL FOREST COVER - 2000

• Half of India's forests have disappeared in the last hundred years, and only 8% of the country's forest cover remains in tact.
• Since 1980 an average of 16 million hectares of natural forest has been converted to other uses each year.
• During the 1990s, the world lost 4.2% of its natural forests.
• Pollution from nickel and cooper smelters in Siberia has destroyed more than 350,000 hectares of forest.

DESERTIFICATION

• Roughly 200,000 square kilometers of the Earth turns to desert each year.
• In November 2002 a NASA team observed a dust storm moving over northeastern China toward the Korean peninsula. Another storm in 2001 came all the way to North America. Desertification in China has reduced the amount of land available for production per capita by half between 1950 and 1990.
• It takes 1,000 years for nature to create one inch of fertile soil.
• One-third of the topsoil in the U.S. has eroded and washed away in the last 40 years.

CHANGE IN ARABLE LAND PER CAPITA 1975-1995

DISASTERS / GLOBAL

Natural disasters are nearly always exasperated by human activity. We are builders, but we build with imperfect knowlege and, often, with our eyes closed to very real dangers. When the well-known patterns of natural events repeat, we look on with horror at the damage done and we learn almost nothing from the experience. The world's elites, it should be noted, are seldom exposed (or, are well-protected by government subsidy and insurance from the consequences of their uncaring behavior).

ENERGY USE

• With less than 5% of the world's population, the U.S. consumes a third of the world's resources and is the source of almost half of all industrial pollution.
• The U.S. imports 2.5 million barrels of oil each day from the Middle East.
• U.S. cities consume 431 gallons of oil per person per year; Australian cities consume 295 gallons per person; European cities 133 gallons per person; and Asian cities 49 gallons per person.
• Just since 1970, the burning of coal and oil has doubled in volume each year.
• World oil production is forecasted to peak well before 2025, then begin to fall. By 2050 annual production is expected to be at levels achieved in the mid-1970s.

EXTINCTION OF PLANT AND ANIMAL SPECIES

• Seven out of ten biologists now believe the world is in the midst of the fastest mass extinction of living things in the 4.5 billion-year history of the planet.
• One-fifth of all freshwater fish are threatened or extinct.
• Scientists estimate that more than a thousand species of birds face extinction, with many more in steady decline. Habitat loss and degradation endangers more birds than any other factor.

EXOTIC SPECIES TRANSFERS

• A side-effect of global transportation of goods is the discharge of ballast water that is often polluted and carries species of life alien to other environments. In 1991 ships from South Asia discharging their ballast in Peruvian ports unleashed a cholorea epidemic infecting several million people and killing 10,000. Jellyfish released into the Black Sea consumed the sea's supply of algae-eating zooplankton, causing an explosion of algae. From there, the jellyfish moved south along the Mediterranean coastline.
• Containers filled with used tires and shipped across the globe have spread insect-carried disease, including forms of yellow fever that have shown up in Hawaii, Brazil, southern Europe and even Australia and New Zealand. In 1991 over 1 million people in Brazil were infected.
• The Asian longhorn beetle has shown up in the U.S. and attacked trees in Chicago and New York City. Killing the insects requires the cutting, chipping and burning of every known or suspected tree infected.

FINANCING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION

• Since the beginning of the 1960s, the World Bank has become the world's largest financier of oil wells, refineries, coal mines, power stations, road-building, and other projects that contribute hevily to the more than 6 billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere EACH YEAR.

FIRES

• Forest and grassland fires in the U.S. are consuming an average of 4 million acres -- roughly the size of New Hampshire -- annually.
• Forest fires are a major cause of degradation of India's forests. While statistical data on fire loss are weak, it is estimated that the proportion of forest areas prone to forest fires annually ranges from 33% in some states to over 90% in other. About 90% of the forest fires in India are created by humans. The normal fire season in India is from the month of February to mid June. India witnessed the most severe forest fires in the recent time during the summer of 1995 in the hills of Uttar Pradesh & Himachal Pradesh.
• Nearly 10 million hectares were burned by fires that engulfed areas of Indonesia in 1997 and 1998. The fires were mostly ignited by plantation companies and others eager to clear forest land as rapidly and cheaply as possible. Economic damages from the resultant breakdown of transportation, destruction of crops and timber, decline in tourism, health care costs, and other impacts have been estimated at $10 billion. Disastrous as the fires were, they were only one sympton of a far greater disaster -- the systematic plunder and destruction of Southeast's Asia's greatest rainforests over the past three decades.
• Over three thousand forest fires have already been recorded in Russia in 2003, covering an area of 130 thousand hectares of land. 70 thousand hectares of forest were destroyed by fire during the spring of 2003, a 100% increase on last year. This figure includes all the subjects of the Russian Federation except for the North West Federal District. The most critical areas are currently Siberia and the Far Eastern regions. The main reasons for the spread of forest fires and their increasing destructiveness are the 'shortage of fire rescue services and poor quality fire-fighting equipment.' About twenty thousand people in Russia are killed in fires every year. One quarter of all the fire victims in the world are Russian.
• In 1999, massive forest fires have forced hundreds of people to leave their homes in the state of New South Wales in Australia.The fires started in the Australian countryside, called the bush, and some the flames are as big as 60 metres high. One line of fire stretched for around 16 miles with almost no break. .
• As populations increase, housing encroaches on forested areas and some of the most sought-after property locations are right on the edge of the forest. Building houses close to forestland is literally playing with fire. This "urban interface problem" is growing at an alarming rate in the US.

FLOODS

• Flooding of China's Yangtze River in 1998 caused $30 billion in damages, displaced 223 million people and killed another 3,700. With 85% of the forest cover gone from the river's basin, the land can no longer absorb heavy rains.
• Between 1970 and 1995, roughly one-third of the earth's forests, freshwater and marine ecosystems were destroyed. Freshwater species declined by 45%. Marine species declined by 35%. Forest cover declined by 10%.
• Weather-related disasters in 1998 caused nearly $100 billion in damage and nearly 32,000 deaths. The world's poor are disproportionately victimized.

FOOD SHORTAGES

• Production of grain reached an all-time highof 1.89 billion tons in 1996. Droughts and intense heat in China and other parts of the globe (along with production and storage problems in Russia) have resulted in reduced production. With the U.S. dollar rising against most currencies in the developing world, countries not self-sufficient in grain are experiencing hunger bordering on mass starvation. By 2025, China, alone, will need to import 175 million tons of grain.
• China depends on irrigated land to produce 70 percent of its grain output. As early as 1972 the Yellow River dried up before reaching the sea. Since 1985 the river has run dry each year, with the dry period becoming progressively longer.
• Hundreds of lakes and streams in China are disappearing. Wells are being dug as deep at 2,500 feet into the ground to locate water. Half of China's cities are now facing chronic water shortages.
• By 2030, China's import demand will equal the entire world's export supply.

HABITAT DESTRUCTION

• The world's coral reefs, which provide shelter and nourishment to one-fourth of all ocean species, are in crisis. Over-fishing disrutes the delicate balance between the ocean's plant and animal life and between sea creatures themselves. Ocean warming has caused mass bleaching in every coral region around the globe.
• Life-giving and life-nurturing mangroves are removed to make way for shrimp farming, logging and human development. One result has been to pollute ocean waters with sediment, further destroying the coral reefs.
• Development in the southern portion of San Franciso Bay has accelerated the discharge of sewage emissions laced with heavy metals (e.g., cadmium, nickel and lead), destroying fisheries that at the beginning of the twentieth century harvested 15 million pounds of oysters annually.
• At least one in eight of the world's known vascular plant species is under threat of extinction due primarily to loss of habitat and the introduction of non-native species.
• Roads and parking lots in the U.S. take up nearly 154,000 swuare kilometers of land. This compares with 191,000 square kilometers of land in the U.S. National Park system.
• Duststorms comingout of northwestern Africa are reaching the world's coral reefs, bringing nutrients that cause algal blooms and coral disease.

HEALTH CARE

• In Zimbabwe, the death toll from AIDs in 1999 was 200 people each day.
• One-third of the 1.5 million HIV-infected people in high-income countries are receiving antiretroviral treatment, while only 230,000 of the 38.5 million infected in low and middle-income countires have access to treatment.
• HIV/AIDs is now the world's fourth-largest killer and the leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease is expected to kill 68 million people between 2000 and 2020 in the 45 most-affected countries.
• From 10 to 60% of soldiers in Sub-Saharan African nations are infected with HIV. Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa are the most seriously impacted.
  
  
  
• About 25% of all disease and injury is linked to environmental decline.
• In the U.S. some 60,000 deaths each year are caused by air pollution.
• Some 1.2 billion billion lack safe drinking water. Nearly 3 billion people do not have access to sanitation.
• Malaria continues to claim over 2.5 million lives annually, and 90% of these deaths are environmentally-related.
• Cholera kills 3 million people annually because of unsafe drinking water.
• A United Nations report indicates that for $13 billion, every person on earth could be provided with adequate basic health and nutrition.
• Tobacco-related diseases kill 4 million people annually. Despite the known risk, tobacco use worldwide is on the rise. By 2030 the estimated annual death toll will be 10 million. Eighty percent of all smokers now live in developing countries, and that number is rapidly growing.

INFESTATIONS

• Food crop losses to pests today are greater than they were before the introduction of pesticides.
• Pesticides are the mainstay of monoculture farming, which itself is a highly unnatural conditon that is very vulnerable to infestation.

MILITARISM

Not that many years ago, one might have had good reason to believe a reprieve had arrived. The collapse of state-socialism and the Soviet Union held out the prospects of an end to global tensions and the potential to redirect spending from military goods to social goods -- from killing to healing. What inevitably emerged to fill the void left by an end to empire-building is ethnic- and pseudo-religious nationalism. Pluralism and social democracy are rejected by those who remain emotionally captured by tribalistic cultural norms that deny to each living person his or her equal birthright to inhabit the earth and access its resources. By 1994, United Nations spending on "peacekeeping" activities reached nearly $4 billion. Clearly, for many people around the globe the peace dividend has not materialized.



Even though the threat of global warfare has fallen, military spending siphons off a significant portion of output.

• From just 1970 to 1990 the percent of civilian war-related deaths increased from 60% to 90%..

OVERFISHING

• In 1998 the salmon population in the North Atlantic feel to its lowest point ever recorded -- fewer than 114,000 mature fish, threatening the ability of the species to spawn and, therefore, survive. The cause: an infectous disease spread in New Brunswick among fish grown by salmon farmers.
• One result of depletion of larger, predatory species of fish is the increase in the population of smaller, previously less-desirable species for commercial use. The catch of these species has replaced that form depleted species stocks.
• Eleven of the world's 15 most important fishing areas have declined in fish populations.

POLLUTION OF AIR

• In India, 70% of the countyr's urban airpollution comes from automobiles, the result of which is that the average resident of Bombay or New Delhi has the lung capacity of a two-pack-a-day smoker. Many cars are diesel powered and are not equipped with pollution control systems.
• Air pollution in India causes an estimated 2.5 million premature deaths annually.
• Sandstorms in northwest Africa can blow dust thousands of miles across the Atlantic.

POLLUTION OF THE RIVERS, LAKES, SEAS AND OCEANS

• In Russia, the Aral Sea is dead. Once the fourth largest inland sea in the world, it has contracted by half its size and lost three-quarters of its volume since the 1960s, when its two feeder rivers were diverted to irrigage cotten fields and rice paddies. The sea may actualy disapper within two decades.
• When a lagoon holding 8 acres of hog urine and feces burst, the spill killed over 10 millio fish in the New River in North Carolina.
• From 1995-1999 the amount of industrial pollution dumped into U.S. and Canadian rivers, lakes and streams rose 26%. The U.S. accounted for 90% of the toxic pollutants released by the two countries. Sources include mining, manufacturing and electric utilities, with mining accounting for nearly half of the total.
• Lake Chad in Africa has shrunk to one-tenth its former size, reduced by massive water withdrawals for irrigated agriculture.
• Researchers have found that plastic is six times more prevalent in the North Pacific than zooplankton.

POLLUTION OF THE LAND

• Royal Dutch/Shell drilling of oil in the Niger River Delta since the late 1950s has come with enormous environmental damage. A human rights lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. against Shell.
• Russian oil production is so environmentally insensitive that its companies continue to spill more crude oil every day than was lost in the Exxon Valdez disaster.

WATER SHORTAGES

• The countries in the Middle East are every year drawing more and more water out of underground acquifers that is not being replenished by rainfall. At the same time, the region's population has doubled just since 1970.
• Up to 7 billion people in 60 countries -- more than the whole present population of the world -- will face water scarcity within the next half-century.
• Over a third of Americans depend on wells and ground water for their drinking water. With rapidly growing paved-over and built-up area, however, large amounts of water are being washed down storm drain systems rather than filtering into the soil to recharge aquifers and provide underground flows to rivers and streams.
• The introduction of some 6 million "tube-wells" in India over the last 30 years, India is loosing sub-surface ground water far faster than it is being replenished. In India's greatest grain growing region, Punjab and Haryana, water tables have fallen over 4 meters in just the last decade.
• By 2020 most regions of India are forecasted to become water-stressed, which widespread and chronic water shortages.
• Water mismanagement has become a crisis of governance that will impact heavily on public health and the environment.
• The cost of desalination -- at $1 to $2 per cubic meter is still well out of reach of the populatoin of most water stressed countries.

WASTE DISPOSAL

• India generated 48 million tons of solid waste annually, most of which is disposedof in unsafe ways: burned, dumped into oceans nad other water bodies, or landfilled.
• In the U.S. an estimated 5 to 7 million tons of electronic waste were discard in 1998, most dumped in landfills or stored. Only 11% was recycled.
• By 2005 Americans will discard about 130 million mobile phones annually, creating 65,000 tons of trash, including toxic pollutants known to cause cancer and a range of neurological, reproductive, and developmental disorders.

Reasons To Be Optimistic?

AGRICULTURE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE

• When coffee is grown under the shade trees of the rain forest, the entire ecosystem benefits. Oxfam has successfully initiated a program to encourage coffee consumers to purchase coffee grown in this environmentally-sensitive manner.

EDUCATION AND LITERACY

• Global inequalities, highlighted in recent literacy figures from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, have revealed that women in the world's least developed countries still have not benefited from the fundamental human right to education.
  
  
  
  
• According to UNESCO statistics, almost a billion illiterates remain as we approach the year 2000, and the prognosis for a major reduction in many countries is not very optimistic. Furthermore, the relatively low rates of illiteracy in industrialized countries are misleading, as countries like the United States begin to realize that low levels of literacy can be just as troubling, and sometimes more difficult to deal with, than illiteracy in some developing countries.
• Newark, East Orange, Union City, West New York, Passaic, Paterson and The Bronx all have more than 44 percent of their adults reading at the lowest literacy levels, according to The State of Literacy in America. The report was produced for NIFL in March by Portland (Ore.) State University Ph.D. Stephen Reder (reder@pdx.edu). Reder's report, which uses statistical models to estimate illiteracy rates in more than 7,500 municipalities, is based upon the U.S. Education Department's 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) of 26,000 Americans 16 and older.
• India's state of Kerala has managed to achieve widespread literacy -- with corresponding positive outcomes in other areas.

ENERGY CONSUMPTION

• In 1997, sales of solar photovoltaic cells expanded 42%. The price has fallen by 80% since 1980.
• The world's largest wind farm is now under construction in the U.S. state of Iowa. The 200 turbines will supply electricity to 85,000 homes when completed in 2006.
• By 1999, the use of solar cells for electrical power was increasing worldwide at an annual rate of 15%. An estimated 500,000 homes (most in remote parts of the developing world) were utilizing solar shingles on roofs to meet their needs for electricity.
• Four cities in the Netherlands are installing wind power turbines on rooftops, each unit capable of generating enough electricity to meet the needs of the average Dutch family.
• By 1999, wind power was increasing at a rate of 26%, producing 21 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity -- enough to power 3.5 million suburban homes.
• A study by Shell Oil indicates that solar energy could easily meet 10% of global energy needs by 2020 and 50% by mid-century.

FAMILY PLANNING

• India's state of Kerala has stabilized its population.
• By 1999, 32 countries containing 14% of the world's population achieved population stability (the United States and China, with under two children per woman, are approaching population stability.
• Nearly two-thirds of women in the developing world are using some form of birth control.
• The U.S. government is the largest international contributor to family planning programs, at $425 million.
• Costa Rican families lead all of Central America in terms of birth control use, at 75%.

FINANCING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION

• In 1992 the World Bank finally established a pilot program to encourge renewable energy and enery efficient investments in Asia.
• This year the World Bank declined financing for the expansion of an state-run gold and silver mine in Romania. Romanian environmentalists had expressed concern that expansion of extraction, using cyanide, would further pollute the region's waterways.

HEALTH CARE

• Reported cases of polio declined by 90% from 1988-1999 due to wide dissemination of the oral vaccine.

MILITARISM

• U.S. expenditures on the military (in 1995 dollars) fell from $410 billion to $250 billion.

PRESERVATION OF OPEN SPACE FROM DEVELOPMENT

• Costa Rica, with more than 25% of the country set aside as parks or preserves, has one of the highest percentages of protected land in the world.
• Around 46% of the Earth's land area remains largely intact wilderness. However, one-third of this amount is Antarctic ice or Arctic tundra and few are in species-rich regions of the globe.

RECYCLING OF RESOURCES

• In a case of the glass being half filled, nearly 80% of all computers and electronic equipment purchased in the U.S. ends up being sent to China, India and Pakistan, where workers remove toxic components for reuse -- but with minimum protection for their health or that of the environment.
• In the United States, over half of all steel production now comes from recycled metal, produced with much less energy and pollution than previously.
• Paper manufacturing plants are now relying increasingly on local supplies of scrap paper rather than on newly-cut trees.
• A growing source of energy in the developing world is the burning of methane collected by hundreds of thousands of small anaerobic digestion processors.

REFORESTATION

• The Costa Rican Government has been a front runner in conservation policy, with 90% of its remaining forest protected, and the largest percentage of its land dedicated to national parks in the world. Along with a strong conservation policy the Costa Rican Government has enacted incentive programs to promote reforestation projects. These incentive programs include such things as residency status and various tax exemptions. Costa Rican land values have been increasing each year, especially so in the pacific region, where this project is located. This makes reforestation in Costa Rica a doubly valuable investment.
• The Chinese government ordered an end to the cutting of timber in the Yangtze river basin and announced a program of reforestation.
• Applied Energy Services, a U.S. power company, has pledged to plant 52 million trees in Guatemala to absorb the same amount of carbon dioxide that its new coal-fired plant in Connecticut will release.
• In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement, a citizens' group, has planted 10 million trees in the past 18 years.
• Governments of several tropical forest countries have declared halting deforestation a top priority. Citizen groups in Malaysia, India, Peru and Brazil have intensified their activities against deforestation.
• In the U.S., groups like TreePeople and the American Forestry Association have planted millions of tees.
• The Brazilian government has set aside tracts of forest--a total area the size of Massachusetts--as "extractive reserves." In these reserves, deforestation is prohibited and local communities can harvest forest products such as rubber and nuts.

In a world grown less and less safe for more and more people, the pressures of an expanding population add further stresses to societies already severely stressed. We may have the scientific and technological knowhow to live in harmony with nature; we clearly do not have the collective will to do so or the socio-political framework in which to foster such a collective will.

To be sure, some of the most visible and arguably the worst human-caused environmental problems have been greatly reduced. The optimist looks at the progress and encourages others to be patient. An editorial that appeared in a 1999 edition of The Economist offered this assessment of how far we have come:

"Once an issue has been identified, and electorates and governments have become convinced that something ought to be done, something has been done. The oldest and worst sources of pollution -- sulphur dioxide and smoke particles -- have been brought steadily under control, ending 300 years of deterioration. So have levels of lead in the air. The only -- and it is a significant only -- exception is that vehicle emissions of some pollutants have stayed high as petrol consumption has outpaced the effect of tighter controls. However, water, whether inrivers or the sea, has become far cleaner since the 1950s, as governments have increasingly insisted on waste water being treated before release."5

The hardest question to answer is whether we have enough time to stop the ongoing harm we are doing to the earth. While we work to change the socio-political origins of many of these problems, I believe it is essential that we provide incentives for people to have fewer children. For some, the incentive of giving the earth and all of its species a change to recover is enough. For the billions of people living day-to-day in an impoverished state, realizing the promise of a better life has to be real. One thing is certain. To lead by example is the only way to lead in this struggle to reduce the human footprint upon the earth.

References

1. Henry George. George. Progress and Poverty (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation edition, 1962. Originally published 1879), pp.555-556.
2. Kurt Sternlof. Tropical Habitat Loss Threatens Mass Extinction Akin To Fall Of The Dinosaurs, Columbia University News, 1 March 2000.
3. Lincoln Steffens. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931), p.401.
4. Rachel Carson. Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), p.6.
5. "Our durable planet," The Economist, 9 September 1999.