Word: planetful
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...future enhancement of agriculture and medicine is not thought enough to merit conservation, then consider survival. The biosphere gives us renewed soils, energy, clean water and the very air we breathe, all free of charge. The more species that compose wild communities, the more stable and resilient becomes the planet as a whole...
...outside experts take control? Should limited hunting be allowed in parks, or should they be put off limits? Mistakes will be made, the landscape will keep changing, and species will still be lost, but the difficulty of the task should not lead us to abandon hope. Many of the planet's natural habitats are gone forever, but many others can be saved and in time restored...
...there were 1.6 billion people here for the party--or a quarter as many as this time. In 1900 the average life expectancy was, in some places, as low as 23 years; now it's 65, meaning the extra billions are staying around longer and demanding more from the planet. The 130 million or so births registered annually--even after subtracting the 52 million deaths--is still the equivalent of adding nearly one new Germany to the world's population each year...
Cheering as the population reports are becoming today, for much of the past 50 years, demographers were bearers of mostly bad tidings. In census after census, they reported that humanity was not just settling the planet but smothering it. It was not until the century was nearly two-thirds over that scientists and governments finally bestirred themselves to do something about it. The first great brake on population growth came in the early 1960s, with the development of the birth-control pill, a magic pharmacological bullet that made contraception easier--not to mention tidier--than it had ever been before...
...again. But there's no telling if the earth--already worked to exhaustion feeding the 6 billion people currently here--can take much more. People in the richest countries consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources, and as poorer nations push to catch up, pressure on the planet will keep growing. "An ecologist looks at the population size relative to the carrying capacity of Earth," says Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute. "Looking at it that way, things are much worse than we expected them to be 20 years...