Life on Tired Earth
Belief:
Nobel Laureate Slams the Bible, Calls It "A Catalogue of Cruelties"
Mario de Queiroz
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
As Foreclosure Nightmares Increase, Will More Homeowners Pay Off Their Bankers in Violence?
Scott Thill
DrugReporter:
Lies About Marijuana Drive People to a Much More Harmful Drug -- Booze
Steve Fox
Environment:
Why Max Baucus' 'No' Vote on the Climate Bill May Really Help Its Passage
Jeff Mcmahon
Food:
Despite Censorship By Beef Magnate, Michael Pollan Spreads Message About the Real Price of Cheap Food
Health and Wellness:
Do We Really Want to Enshrine Insurance Monopoly into Law? This and 5 Other Complaints About the Health Bill
John Nichols
Immigration:
NYC Marathon Raises Question of Who Is American Enough?
James E. Johnson, Jr.
Media and Technology:
How Biased Media Can Brainwash You
Melinda Burns
Movie Mix:
The Yes Men: Pranksters Out to Fix the World
Mark Engler
Politics:
4 Ways the Stupak Amendment Deprives Women of Access to Abortion
Jessica Arons
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Fetus-Shaped Potatoes? Going Undercover Inside the Weird World of Right-Wing Abortion Foes
Ann Neumann
Rights and Liberties:
"My Kids Want to Hide Their Identity; They're Scared Someone Will Attack Us": U.S. Muslims Being Targeted
Jaisal Noor
Sex and Relationships:
Instant Sex: Has the Digital Age Destroyed Relationships or Made Them Better?
Vanessa Richmond
Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders
Water:
Why Natural Gas Is Not a Clean Energy Panacea
Stan Cox
World:
With Unemployment at 40 Percent, Afghan Teens Enlist in Army, Police
Lal Aqa Sherin
For hundreds of years, cod swarmed in waters off Newfoundland's rugged coast. But by 1992, rampant overfishing had crushed the cod. Price tag to people: tens of thousands of jobs lost and billions of dollars spent in job retraining.
Last year, a weather satellite spotted a monster dust cloud over Africa — hard to miss at 5,000 miles wide. Tree-cutting in northern Africa helps nourish such clouds, which cross the Atlantic, settle into U.S. coastal waters, and possibly contribute to toxic algae blooms. Price tag to people: breathing problems for U.S. coastal residents.
Cod depletion and dust clouds seem like pretty different problems. But they each play a role in the overall environmental degradation of the planet — a condition that a new global study says has escalated so quickly over the past 50 years that it outpaces anything experienced by ecosystems in human history. Demands for water, food, fuel, timber, and fiber — all part of global economic expansion -- have driven the change. The result: a big increase in short-term human benefits, less hunger, and more wealth. But this progress has been counterbalanced by a massive loss of diversity of life on Earth.
That's the state of the world, according to the first Millennium Ecosystem Assessment produced by some 1,300 scientists from 95 countries charged with painting a global eco-portrait. The United Nations-sponsored study was funded by the World Bank and several private foundations.
"We've had many reports on environmental degradation, but for the first time we're now able to draw connections between ecosystem services and human well-being," says Cristian Samper, director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington and a chief architect of the study.
Northern Africa's drying Sahel region and Newfoundland's emptier coastal waters, he says, are just two examples in an overall conclusion that 60 percent of the world's ecosystems are being degraded or used unsustainably. Ecosystems being drained or degraded largely in the pursuit of human well-being include:
Mark Clayton is a staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor.
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