"Benford-HumanityCancer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

but also the heads of many scientific societies, Nobel Laureates, and
authorities of many fields. One such Laureate, Henry Kendall of M.I.T., is
leading the New Cassandras in a campaign to muse the intelligentsia.

His case is easy to make. World population grows by 90 million yearly and will
double within half a century, maybe less. More people have been born in the last
forty years than in the previous three million years. About 8 percent of all
human beings ever born live today. We are gaining at about 1.7 percent a year.

Meanwhile, the Green Revolution is apparently over: world per-capita crops have
declined. About ten percent of the Earth's agricultural land area has been
damaged by humans. Water may be the first major resource to go; half of all
nations now have water shortages. Even in the American midwest and southwest,
farmers are sucking "fossil water" laid down in the ice ages, pulling it from
aquifers which will deplete within a generation.

But such policy-wonk numbers, the ecologists remind us, are too human-centered.
Our swelling numbers have their greatest impact on defenseless species in rain
forests, savannahs and coral reefs. Biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard warns that
we could lose thirty percent of all species within half a century, and that
might be only the beginning.

Humans exert selective pressures on the biological world. North Atlantic waters
show a clear pattern of over-fishing, and ever-shrewd nature has filled these
new niches with "trash fish" like skates and spiny dogfish which we cannot eat
and thus do not take out.

Monoculture crops worldwide gain efficiency by growing the same staple-wheat,
rice, corn, trees-over a large area, but this is inherently more fragile.
Diseases and predators prey easily and already erosion is a major threat in many
such areas.

Environmental damage grows not merely because our numbers rise, but because our
expectations do, too. The masses jammed into Buenos Aires want a better life --
which means more consumer goods. The chain between such ambitions and the
clearing of distant forests is, though long, quite clear.

Most environmentalists are technophobic, reluctant to admit that the greatest
enemy of the rain forests is not Dow Chemical but rather sunburned, ambitious
men newly armed with chain saws, eager to better their lot in life.

Still, hand-wringing is not new and skepticism about it is well earned. Paul
Ehrlich's alarmist "The Population Bomb" has yet to explode, twenty-five years
after publication, though some demographers feel that Ehrlich may simply be a
few decades off.

And there are counter-trends. Many are laboring to see that the factor b does
not increase.

The "developing world" -- to use the latest evasive tag attempting to cover