Absurdities of 2001

More than 30 million acres of woodlands in the southern United States will be lost to urban development over the next four decades, while some environmentalists claim the burgeoning chip mill industry in the South, churning up trees to feed the nation's demand for paper, is even more threatening to the arboreal ecosystem.

Sink holes appear around the Dead Sea, damaging hotels and other structures, as the water level falls because of diversion of Jordan River water consequent to growth in that troubled region.

"Instead of using some of that productivity for leisure, we shuffle back to work so we can afford more stuff that we don't really need," remarks Betsy Taylor of the Center for a New American Dream, noting that Americans now work more than 47 hours per week on average, more hours than workers in any other country, including Japan.

As the world's fisheries suffer collapse due to overfishing, oceanic fish farms spread across the globe to satisfy growing demand, but the farms only exacerbate the problem, devastating native stocks through inadvertent escape of domesticated fish, contamination of nearby waterways, and the spread of diseases endemic amongst the penned Pisces.

Loggers take advantage of another bad fire season in the western United States to argue that the fires prove the need for stepped-up tree harvesting, forgetting that the main motivation behind the Forest Service's decades-long fire suppression policy which turned the woods into tinder boxes was the country's unquenchable thirst for more lumber.

California water officials warn of a possible drought next year if winter snows fail to fall heavily - one lawmaker likening this summer's water war at Klamath Falls in neighboring Oregon to "the canary in the mine" - but thousands of new wells continue to be drilled each year, further lowering the water table.

Presidents Vicente Fox of Mexico and George Bush of the United States hammer out an agreement to normalize the status of millions of Mexicans working illegally in the United States, as many more Mexicans seek to work for low wages and without the benefit of citizenship despite one hundred plus years of unrestrained growth policy by the Mexican government.

A Monterey County, California judge orders limiting the spraying of the pesticide methyl bromide near two schools and responds to criticism from local strawberry growers with the insightful remark "Before we had methyl bromide, we had strawberries."

In Colombia, labor leaders are gunned down by paramilitary groups and American companies bent on growth, including Drummond Coal and Coca-Cola, are accused of collaborating with the assassins.

Shoppers and theater-goers find it hard to enjoy the new amenities sprouting up in a revitalized downtown Berkeley, California as the building spree gobbles up already scarce parking places, but the construction goes on apace.

In Europe, scientists search for an alternative to ivermectine, a medicine given to cows to protect them from parasites which makes their droppings so lethal to insects a single cow pie can kill 20,000 of them in a week, threatening the survival of birds that eat the insects, not to mention the toll taken on the insects themselves.

One out of ten American women is at risk of having a newborn with neurological problems due to mercury exposure, while the amount of hazardous materials in our homes - now estimated at 3 to 10 gallons per household - continues to grow and 90% of the 80,000 chemicals out there have never been safety tested.

Man's tinkering with Nature to feed an ever larger human population leads to the development of genetically modified soybeans - now accounting for two-thirds of the U.S. crop - but five years of experience with the Frankenbeans reveals problems with soil microbes being thrown out of balance and new types of resistant weeds popping up in herbicide-laden fields.

Environmental concerns go out the window as the Bush administration opens up previously protected public lands in the western United States - including national monuments and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - to oil exploration, all in an attempt to satisfy the nation's unquenchable thirst for economic growth.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates it will take 240 years to restore grouhdwater contaiminated with rocket fuel at a site in northern California, while the United States pushes forward with plans for an anti-ballistic missile defense.

Angry farmers in Klamath Falls, Oregon take matters into their own hands, illegally opening the floodgates at Klamath Lake to irrigate their parched fields, as the conflicting interests of farmers, consumers, and endangered salmon threaten to turn violent, a premonition perhaps of things to come as continued growth puts pressure on vital resources -water amongst them.

Japan is projected to face a decline in population in coming years, causing some "experts" to fret about the consequences for Japan's prosperity, reflecting the widely-held but totally unproven belief in a link between growth and prosperity.

Environmentalists find the road to unsustainability paved with good intentions as a professor at Dartmouth College demonstrates that plastic grocery bags are actually more environmentally friendly than paper bags when the entire lifecycle of the products is considered, showing that the best hope for the environment is not substitutability but limitations on the fodder for landfills.

Global warming could wipe out all the brook trout and half the brown and rainbow trout in Wisconsin over the next 30 years, according to the EPA, costing that state billions in sports anglers' spending, while the Kyoto Accords become a dead letter.

The part of humanity living in cities has risen from 18% to - for the first time in human history - over 50% in the last 50 years, with the number of "megacities" (over 10 million people) expected to rise to 23 over the next 15 years - Dhaka, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Tokyo, and New York being amongst the cities you won't want to be living in then.

One of the 355 surviving mountain gorillas falls prey to hungry militiamen, as the carnage of the chaotic, never-ending wars in that part of Africa extends beyond the fractious human species.

With the world facing an increasingly severe water shortage, the Westin hotel chain introduces hydra-like double showerheads which gush five gallons a minute down the drain.

While the amount of insecticides used by American farmers has increased ten-fold since 1945, the percentage of U.S. pre-harvest crops lost to insects has also increased over the same time period - from 7% to 13%.

While the Mississippi River records its fourth "100-year flood" in the last eight years, the Bush administration cuts a $162 million program that pays farmers to restore wetlands and a $25 million program that helps communities buy flood-prone properties, the Army Corps of Engineers goes on constructing the levees which exacerbate the problem, and the building (and rebuilding) in the floodplain continues.

Perhaps man can learn from experience, as California imposes restrictions on its booming squid catch long before the last squid is snared from the same bay - Monterey Bay - which saw the total collapse of the sardine fishery celebrated in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row because of the shortsightedness of the fathers of today's squidders.

While the world's population burgeons and is widely blamed for the poverty afflicting underdeveloped countries, Russia contemplates adopting policies to encourage a higher birthrate, including tax breaks and housing subsidies for bigger families, to counter its declining population trend.

Mexico faces a long-term water crisis as its drinking water supply per capita drops to 60 per cent of what it was 50 years ago - less than in Egypt - and pollution contaminates 73 per cent of its water resources, while the Mexican government continues to supply water to agribusiness and mining firms for free.

While some scientists attribute the disappearance of toads, frogs, and other amphibians from lakes and ponds around the globe to global warming - perhaps the canaries in our open-pit mine called Earth -, President Bush declares the Kyoto accords on reducing carbon emissions dead.

Despite the establishment of a nature preserve in China to protect the panda, the destruction of the bear's forest habitat has accelerated since the park's creation - from 52 acres a year before 1975 to 237 acres a year since then - due to increased human population in the park.

Mad cow and hoof and mouth disease decimate the world's livestock, an affliction compounded by the increasingly artificial methods by which animals are raised to feed a growing global population, but the number of hungry mouths needing to be filled continues to soar.

In America, illness from food is on the rise with Americans more likely to get sick from what they eat than 50 years ago (gastrointestinal illness is 34% higher than in 1948, for example), a shortage of food inspectors, especially for imports, being cited as one of the reasons.

A study by several universities and think tanks declares that in Los Angeles "sprawl has hit the wall", concluding that the city has reached its social, structural, and ecological limits, but the city keeps growing, with another 6 million people expected to be absorbed in the next 20 years.

Could there be a link between the 5 million American children who have asthma, which has become the most common chronic childhood illness, and the 18 million American children under 10 who live in areas where the air they breathe does not meet minimal federal standards?

Authorities in France prepare to re-open the Mont Blanc Tunnel - closed after a 1999 truck accident in which 39 were killed - to trucking, but environmentalists protest, citing the threat of a smudgy appearance settling on Europe's most picturesque peak, under which the tunnel runs.

Satellite mapping shows that only 16% of the world's farmland is free of fertility problems, such as chemical contamination, salinity, or poor drainage, with contamination by aluminum alone making 17% of the farmland worldwide toxic to plants and nearly 4 million acres being lost to excessive salt, while the world's hungry population is expected to grow by 1.5 billion over the next 20 years.

What little is left of Finland's old growth forests - just 5% of the original extent - is in danger of being logged so that Americans (and others) can peruse 3-pound Sunday newspapers filled with articles and advertisements they'll never read.

Zero growth advocates are tempted to declare victory as Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve, annnounces that U.S. economic growth "is close to zero", but we are not heartened by the way in which zero growth has been achieved or Mr. Greenspan's conviction that this is a bad thing.

With the U.S. economy in a downturn, the state of Montana considers relaxing its environmental protection laws in order to attract industry, threatening to turn the "Big Sky Country" into the "Big Haze Country".

Millions of bushels of genetically engineered corn approved only for animal use made its way into the human food supply in the United States, forcing government and industry to scramble to find the corn and retrieve it before it is incorporated in more taco shells and corn bread.

California grapples with a power crisis and emissions from power plants in the state triple as smog enforcement regulations are relaxed and older, higher-polluting plants are brought back into service.

Over one-third of the UN's membership - 68 countries - experienced significant conflict, either internal or external, in 2000, a situation which is sure to worsen as economic and demographic growth intensifies the struggle for limited resources amongst people both rich and poor.

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