Word: planetful
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...environmentalist can reel off a long list of grievous problems confronting the planet -- from acid rain and global warming to the destruction of tropical rain forests. The hard part is getting people to do something about them. Last week two fresh ideas for encouraging environmental activism were proposed, one a carrot, the other a stick...
...stick could be a United Nations environmental police force deployed around the world to guard the planet's most precious natural resources. That is the vision put forward by Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock in a speech before the U.N. General Assembly. Mock points out that the growing body of international law governing use of the atmosphere, the oceans, the North and South Poles and other "global commons" will require new enforcement mechanisms to give it teeth. "Just as we have become accustomed to the Blue Helmets ((of the U.N. security forces)) in peacekeeping operations," he said, "we hope that...
...often wrongly attributed to Mark Twain), but nobody does anything about it. The word from scientists is that whoever said this was wrong. All of us, as we go about the mundane business of existence, are helping change the weather and every other aspect of life on this fair planet: Los Angelenos whipping their sunny basin into a brown blur on the way to work every morning; South Americans burning and cutting their way through the rain forest in search of a better life; a billion Chinese, their smokestacks belching black coal smoke, marching toward the 21st century...
...dioxide dumped into the atmosphere as a result of all this activity traces a wobbly rising line that gets steeper and steeper with time. Sometime in the next 50 years, say climatologists, all that carbon dioxide, trapping the sun's heat like a greenhouse, could begin to smother the planet, raising temperatures, turning farmland to desert, swelling oceans anywhere from four feet to 20 feet. Goodbye Venice, goodbye Bangladesh. Goodbye to millions of species of animals, insects and plants that haven't already succumbed to acid rain, ultraviolet radiation leaking through the damaged ozone layer, spreading toxic wastes or bulldozers...
...species that can change its planet's chemistry just by day-to-day coming and going has, I suppose, achieved a kind of coming-of-age. We could celebrate or tremble. What do we do when it is not war that is killing us but progress? When it is not the actions of a deranged dictator threatening the world but the ordinary business of ordinary people? When there are no bombs dropping, nobody screaming, nothing to fear but a line on a graph or a handful of numbers on a computer printout? Dare we change the world on the basis...