Word: worldwatch
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...state of the world has mostly gone downhill. Air pollution, a major issue in Stockholm, has grown significantly worse in most cities. Even more alarming, it is now overshadowed by broad atmospheric changes, such as ozone depletion and the buildup of greenhouse gases. According to the Washington- based Worldwatch Institute, one of the hundreds of environmental pressure groups advising the Earth Summit negotiators, the world has lost 200 million hectares (500 million acres) of trees since 1972, an area roughly one-third the size of the continental U.S. The world's farmers, meanwhile, have lost nearly 500 million tons...
...ingenuity has consistently belied such predictions. Books such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in 1968 and the Club of Rome's 1972 study The Limits to Growth raised fears that unchecked population growth might lead to mass starvation. Later in the '70s, Lester Brown of Washington's Worldwatch Institute argued that the world's farmers were already pushing the practical limits of what good land, high-yield crops, irrigation and artificial fertilizers and pesticides could deliver...
...much new energy from savings as from all the net increases of energy supply," asserts Amory Lovins, director of research at Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo. "Efficiency is a clear winner in the market, leaving everything else in the dust." Declares Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute: "We as a nation should be hell-bent for efficiency. The exciting thing about conservation is, we have a huge potential for savings with already existing technology...
...groups are calling for fact-finding missions and legal action to discourage future acts of ecowarfare. Their worst nightmare is that the idea of holding nature hostage will spread to other conflicts. "I don't think we can tolerate this happening again," says Michael Renner, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute. "The environment is already under attack from our activities in peacetime." What can be done to prevent recurrences? One possibility: an international agreement that, like a Geneva Convention, would make ecoterrorism a war crime as punishable by law as the murder of hostages or the torture of POWs...
...cold war was the paradigm of the old world order. The New Paradigm is what we are seeking. Communism and socialism are Old Paradigm. Big ideology is dead, and global environmentalism will come more and more alive. "In effect," says Lester R. Brown, president of Worldwatch Institute, "the battle to save the planet will replace the battle over ideology as the organizing theme of the new world order. The goal of the cold war was to get others to change their values and behavior. Winning the battle to save the planet depends on changing our own values and behavior...