Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Malthus cared about only one species: ours. And, ecologically speaking, ours is an unusual species. With the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, we became the first species in the 3.7 billion-year history of life not to be living as small populations off the natural fat of the land. Taking food production into our own hands, we stepped outside the local ecosystem. All but a few cultivated plants became weeds, and all but a few domesticated herds, pets and game animals became pests and vermin...
...food, shelter, clothing and fuel. We rely on natural products to replenish genetic diversity in our crops and to produce new medicines. We rely on pristine ecosystems to replenish oxygen, regulate water cycles, control erosion, cycle essential nutrients and restock critical fisheries. We still need these things to sustain life--our life. The irony is that our rampant success in living outside the world's ecosystems has put them all, and thus ourselves, in jeopardy...
...systems. We may not drive ourselves to the complete oblivion of biological extinction, but I fear that the Malthusian specters of famine, warfare and disease will rise in the comparatively short run (the next few centuries), coupled with an accelerating loss of human cultural diversity and, ultimately, quality of life...
...greenhouse effect is nothing new; it has been operating ever since the earth formed. Without it, the surface of the globe would be a frigid -20[degrees]C (-4[degrees]F), the oceans would have frozen, and no life would have developed. So the issue we face in the next millennium is not whether there will be a greenhouse effect, but whether humans, by burning fossil fuels, are adding enough carbon dioxide to the atmosphere to change it (and our climate) in significant ways...
Consider too the sharks: apex predators, lords of the food chain, inspiration for scary stories. A few years ago, I dived off the coast of Costa Rica in a marine preserve where, supposedly, all life was protected. 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...