November 20, 1998
Between 1970 and 1990, human population doubled. The number of registered cars more than doubled. Oil consumption climbed from 17 billion barrels a year to 24 billion.
Last year was the warmest on record. This year is warmer. More than 60 percent of commercial fish species are near depletion. Frogs are disappearing. Coral reefs are dying. More than one in 10 of the world's plant species are on the verge of extinction.
By the year 2025, the carbon dioxide emissions of China alone will equal 50 percent of the entire planet's emissions today.
My sources are Don Worster, Hall distinguished professor of American history at the University of Kansas, and Kris Krishtalka, director of the Natural History Museum. They spoke recently at a class sponsored by the KU Center for International Programs.
Besides numbers, they shared their thoughts about how we got ourselves into this pretty mess.
Worster blames our wealth. It's given us the power, in the words of environmentalist Barry Commoner, "to tear the ecological fabric." It puts chainsaws in the hands of rain-forest dwellers, and seeds new technologies everywhere, technologies that lengthen the lives of rich and poor alike.
Our collective wealth has furnished highly sophisticated medical care and built life-preserving sewage and water plants. It permits the poorest people of Calcutta or Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to survive, if not thrive.
Thus, the human birth rate and death rate are way out of balance, Worster says. Couple that imbalance with an endless appetite for consumer goods, and the enormous burden on the resources of this island Earth becomes obvious.
Worster points out that the drive for personal and national wealth isn't old. It was once just a gleam in the eye of Adam Smith, the father of capitalism. But since Smith, he says, the drive for wealth has triumphed over the conclusion reached by every major world religion: that love of money and material objects is a vice.
Krishtalka takes the world's religions to task for not addressing more vigorously the sin of gluttony represented by consumerism and for failing to take leadership in caring for what they claim to be God's creation.
He also focuses on overpopulation and on our use of environmentally harmful energy resources as key problems. Our economic formulas need to include the cost of treating the Earth as a sink for our wastes, he says.
Krishtalka and Worster agree that people aren't worried enough. Both hope for an enormous shift in attitude.
And both say that it'll be much warmer in Kansas by the mid-21st century than it is today. In fact, it should be a lot like West Texas, Worster predicts.
Which is terrific news, if you like armadillos.
Story by Roger Martin