Word: arounders
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Mark Hertsgaard's most recent book is Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future
...speculated that the limit to the human population would be on the order of 13 billion--remarkably close to many current estimates. For our position in the natural world is once again undergoing a sea change. We are not the first nor are we the only species to spread around the globe, but we are the first to do so as an integrated economic entity. Other species maintain tenuous genetic connections, but no direct ecological connections, among their far-flung members. We, in contrast, are exchanging more than $1 trillion of goods and services among ourselves globally every...
Unless. We can, I think, find the inner will to wake up to our current situation, to see the grimmer outlook around the corner and to choose to do something about it. We can stabilize our numbers and temper our patterns of consumption. We can work to stem the tide of ecosystem destruction and species loss. We can, in short, see ourselves for what we have become: the first global economic entity, a fascinating state arrived at through no end of cleverness but a state that is ultimately limited by the health and productivity of the natural system in which...
...causes greenhouse warming, it would be an easy matter to predict how hot the world will be in the next century. Unfortunately, things aren't that simple. The world is a complex place, and reducing it to the climatologist's tool of choice--the computer model--isn't easy. Around almost every statement in the greenhouse debate is a penumbra of uncertainty that results from our current inability to capture the full complexity of the planet in our models...
...Every day, looking down, I saw the sea bottom carpeted with the corpses of whitetip reef sharks, grotesquely stripped of their fins by poachers who had slashed them off to sell to the soup markets of Asia and had cast the living animals back into the sea to die. Around the world, the numbers of some shark species have declined as much as 80%. Some may already be practically extinct; the survivors in the current generation may be too few to replace themselves...