Absurdities of 2004

Struggling nations around the world pin their export hopes on a nascent textile industry, only to find their "growth" threatened by a WTO-imposed end to the quota system which will subject the smaller producers to unbeatable competition from China, the world's textile behemoth, suggesting not all can grow in a world of finite resources and markets.

The clear-cutting of hardwood forests to establish more lucrative pine plantations on the Cumberland Plateau in the southeastern United States has environmentalists concerned about the impact on wildlife - the plateau being second only to California's Central Valley in the number of threatened and endangered species - but the best they can propose is to encourage companies to consider where their paper products come from and buy from "environmentally friendly source", the devastating effect of growth itself in increasing the demand for lumber and causing forested land to be converted to shopping malls being glossed over.

At a conference on water,organized by Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), delegates from across the world voiced their concern about the impact of escalating demand for water, while the solution some offer - greater investment in water infrastructure - reflects the growth-addicted mentality which got us into this mess in the first place.

The Bush administration opened up millions of acres of forest land in the United States to logging a few years back; now stacks of cut timber lie abandoned by the roadside in Alaska's Tongass National Forest as adverse economic conditions (cheap lumber from Russia and South America) cause logging companies to surrender their concessions.

Progress in cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay proves illusory as official pronouncements of improvements are revealed to be based on computer models, not actual testing of the water, and a more empirical study shows that oxygen levels in the bay have not improved since 1985 as environmental efforts prove unequal to the task of counteracting continued growth.

The attention of the world is focused (briefly) on the poverty, famine, and inevitably ensueing violence in Africa, but nobody explains how the dire straits in which so many Africans find themselves is likely to be relieved in a world of increased pressure on limited resources.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) bickers with environmentalists over whether severely depleted fish stocks - George's Bank cod having declined by 77% since 1978 and West Coast rockfish by 97% since the late 60's - are on the rebound or not, neither side addresses the question of how the fish can hope to recover in a world of unrestrained growth.

While India develops nuclear weapons to kill those beyond its borders, thousands within its borders die of hunger and disease, a situation aggravated by the same frenzy for growth that underpins India's (and every other country's) nuclear weapons program.

While the average size of the American family has decreased over the last thirty years, the average size of the American home has increased (from 1520 sq. ft. in 1971 to 2120 sq. ft. in 1996).

A saying current in Saudi Arabia - "I rode a camel; my son drives a Mercedes; his son pilots a Lear jet; his son will ride a camel" - bespeaks a fate likely to befall many more than just the Saudia Arabians as world oil production peaks and begins its inexorable decline.

Scientists in the United States claim they have come up with a way to obtain a crude fuel oil from pig manure, leading some wags to suggest they strap plastic bags to cow's butts to trap methane emissions as well, as a response to the soon-to-be peak in world oil production.

It is said the Russians have learned two things since the fall of the Soviet Union: the first, that everything they were told about communism was a lie; the second, that everything they were told about capitalism is true, suggesting that something larger than ideology or this or that economic system lies behind the doldrums so much of the world finds itself suffering through. Could it be the limits to growth?

Futurists of the past assured us that by the millennium we would all be casting about for meaningful ways to fill our leisure time, labor-saving devices and the prosperity they brought having reduced work to a mere afterthought; but today Americans, the beneficiaries of the richest, most advanced society on the planet, spend more hours at work than they ever have before nad more than those in any other country.

Bitter squabbling rocks the Sierra Club as rival factions fling mud at each other over the issues of population and immigration, showing how divisive these sensitive issues can be despite the obvious link between them and environmental degradation.

Futurists of the past assured us that soon we would all be casting about for meaningful ways to fill our leisure time, labor-saving devices and the prosperity they brought having reduced work to a mere afterthought; but Americans, the beneficiaries of the richest, most advanced society on the planet, still today spend more hours at work than any other people on earth and more than they ever have before.

While world petroleum reserves, a non-renewable resource, are predicted to be exhausted within the lifetime of young people alive today, in the United States gasoline sells for about the same price as spring water, a renewable resource.

Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, suggests zero is an appropriate rate of interest, a conclusion with which we heartily concur (and the only rate the Church considered Christian throughout most of its history), but credit card companies, mortgage lenders, and others fail to respond to the suggestion.

Hundreds of military families suffering dire health effects from wellwater contaminated with chlorinated hydrocarbons (trichloroethylene) at the U.S. Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune in North Carolina - to which up to 200,000 Marines and their families were exposed between 1980 and 1985 - press their case with the courts, underlining the lax environmental standards applied when it comes to matters of "national security" and highlighting the hidden cost of maintaining a world of haves and have-nots.

Add the mysterious and catastrophic decline of three species of vulture in South Asia, recently found to be attributable to the use of the painkiller Diclofenac in the treatment of lame animals, to the calamities associated with diseases - SARS, avian flu, mad cow disease - which can be tied to the increased pressure, and the increasing artificiality, placed on Nature by man's activities.

Diet books (South Beach Diet, The Ultimate Weight Solution, etc.) top the bestsellers list in Washington, DC, probably none of which suggest emulating the eating habits of impoverished Third Worlders as a sure way to lose weight.

In their book "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke", Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi report disconcerting statistics about the condition of the American middle class - family bankruptcies up 400% in the last 25 years, homeownership virtually impossible for other than two-income families, two-income families earning 75% more than one-income families of a generation ago but having less discretionary income as such necessary expenditures as home mortgages, health insurance, and college tuition eat up their dollars - but the authors, in prescribing the usual remedies (buy smaller houses, cheaper cars) fail to see the big picture: a decline in the overall standard of living is inevitable in a world of increasing pressure on finite resources, even in the land of golden dreams.

In Mexico, armed poachers ravage the coastline for the eggs of endangered sea turtles, but the Mexican government has little to offer the men in the way of more lawful employment (or a ticket to the United States) as the ranks of the unemployed swell.

In bucolic Loudoun County, Virginia - the second fastest-growing county in the United States - the newly-elected pro-growth board of supervisors repeals preservation measures enacted by the previous slow-growth board, assuring the conversion of prime farmland to asphalt and housing tracts as the Washington, DC metropolitan area expands ever outward. You can almost hear the subdivide-and-pave supervisors crowing “We’re number 1”, but will their grandchildren consider unrestrained growth something to crow about?

An ebullient NASA reveals photos of the desolate Mars surface taken by its rover, feeding the fantasies of those who would look to outer space to supplement the finite resources of Mother Earth (including the President of the homeland of hard-nosed pragmatism!), but more sober minds point out that the possibility of travel by humans to the Red Planet is zilch, seeing as “an astronaut traveling to Mars would absorb about 130,000 millirems of a particularly virulent form of radiation that would probably destroy every cell in his body” (Anne Applebaum, in The Washington Post, 1/7/04).

In Britain, a study reveals that the sperm count in males has dropped 29% since 1989, with factors from diet to pollution being suggested as the cause. One thing for sure, it's something in the environment.




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