Word: globalize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more information-rich, the easier it will be to find uses for the diminishing amount of discarded materials. Maybe, with the help of brokering services on the Internet, we can generalize the principle that governs garage sales: One person's garbage is another's treasure. When that attitude goes global, the human beings of the third millennium may be able to look back on their former garbage-producing ways as a forgivable error of their youth as a species...
This means that in an economic--if not a political--sense, we have become a single, enormous population. The system in which we are living, extracting our energy and other supplies, is global: the totality of Earth's atmosphere, its waters, its soils and crust, and all its living things. This is the sum total of all the world's local ecosystems--ecosystems we have allowed to decay as we have chosen (quite successfully!) to live outside them...
...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 we live. We can, if we choose to do so, prove Malthus' direst prognostications wrong...
...long ago, people talked about global warming in apocalyptic terms--imagining the Statue of Liberty up to its chin in water or an onslaught of tropical diseases in Oslo. Recently, however, advances in our understanding of climate have moved global warming from a subject for a summer disaster movie to a serious but manageable scientific and policy issue...
...swings at the upper end, you have to go back 10,000 years, to when the earth was exiting the last Ice Age. Temperatures during the Ice Age were 5[degrees]C (10[degrees]F) cooler than they are now, and there was a series of incidents during which global temperatures changed as much as 10[degrees]F in a matter of decades. If that were to happen now, expanding oceans might flood coastlines and generate fiercer storms. And as weather patterns changed, some places could get wetter and some dryer, and the ranges of diseases could expand. Civilization...