[Mb-civic] US Takes the Lead in Trashing Planet

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0413-22.htm

Published on Wednesday, April 13, 2005 by the Boston 
Globe

US Takes the Lead in Trashing Planet
by Derrick Z. Jackson


For more than four years, President Bush has told us he 
needs to see the ''sound science" on global warming 
before joining the rest of the world in combating it. In June 
2001, he brushed off criticism of his pullout from the Kyoto 
Protocol, saying: ''It was not based upon science. The 
stated mandates in the Kyoto treaty would affect our 
economy in a negative way."

A year later, Bush's own Environmental Protection Agency 
put out a report that the burning of fossil fuels in the 
human activities of industry and automobiles are huge 
contributors to the greenhouse effect. He publicly trashed 
the report, embarrassing then-EPA administrator Christine 
Todd Whitman, saying, ''I read the report put out by the 
bureaucracy."

Now comes a new study, by a bureaucracy representing 
just about the whole planet. It is the Millennium Ecosystem 
Assessment, commissioned by the United Nations in 2000 
at a cost of $24 million and compiled by 1,360 experts 
from 95 countries. It is the latest in dire reports as to how 
we are doing the planet in and, implicitly, how the United 
States puts its interests and pollution over the welfare of 
the rest of the planet.

The report said human beings, whose numbers have 
doubled to 6 billion, have changed the world's ecosystems 
more in the last 50 years than in any other period in our 
pursuit of food, fuel, water, and wood products. More land 
was converted to agriculture since World War II than in the 
18th and 19th centuries combined.

Those conversions, aggravated by the use of synthetic 
nitrogen fertilizers, have led to 10 to 30 percent of 
mammal, bird, and amphibian species facing the threat of 
extinction. Highlights of what we have already lost in the 
last 50 years include: 20 percent of the world's coral reefs, 
with another 20 percent seriously degraded, and 35 
percent of the world's mangroves.

The dilemma is that many of the changes in agricultural, 
fishing, and industrial technology have had incredible 
benefits for human beings, including the reduction of 
hunger and poverty. But in the process, 60 percent of the 
services the world's ecosystems provide, from basic food 
to disease management to aesthetic enjoyment, have 
been degraded. One example that is particularly painful in 
New England and Atlantic Canada is the collapse of 
fishing stocks.

''Any progress achieved in addressing the goals of poverty 
and hunger eradication, improved health, and 
environmental protection is unlikely to be sustained if most 
of the ecosystem services on which humanity relies 
continue to be degraded," the study said.

The study offered several scenarios of how humans can 
halt the degrading of the planet. The most obvious 
strategies involve a global economy where the sharing of 
education, skills, technology, and resources leads to a 
reduction in poverty and pressures on local environments. 
The worst possible scenario is one called ''Order from 
Strength," which results in ''a regionalized and fragmented 
world, concerned with security and protection, 
emphasizing primarily regional markets, paying little 
attention to public goods, and taking a reactive approach 
to ecosystem problems."

That precisely describes the United States. We consume 
a quarter of the world's energy, are the world's leading 
contributor to the greenhouse gases of global warming, 
and take advantage of agriculture in all parts of the world 
so we can have fresh peaches, peppers, and berries 365 
days a year if we wish. Not surprisingly, the Millennium 
Ecosystem Assessment has been out for two weeks and 
there has not been a peep out of the administration on it -- 
the same administration that needed no sound science on 
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The assessment was cochaired by the World Bank's chief 
scientist, Robert Watson. Watson was formerly NASA's 
chief environmental scientist and environmental adviser in 
the Clinton administration. Watson said two weeks ago 
that the study reinforces his belief that climate change 
''may become the most dominant threat to ecological 
systems over the next hundred years."

The World Bank has been in the news for other reasons, 
being so important to Bush that he had the right-wing 
defense hawk Paul Wolfowitz installed as president. It will 
be interesting, once Wolfowitz -- hardly known for his 
caring about birds, insects, and Iraqi civilians -- is fully in 
power, how much more Watson and the World Bank will 
speak out about how we are doing ourselves in. Watson 
speaks for 1,360 experts from 95 countries. It's only a 
matter of time before we hear Wolfowitz saying, ''I read 
the report put out by the bureaucracy."

© 2005 Boston Globe

###


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