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Japan had a similar experience in 1989 when the real estate bubble burst, depreciating stock and real estate assets by 60 percent. The bad-debt fallout and other effects of this collapse have left the once-dynamic Japanese economy dead in the water.

The bursting of these two bubbles primarily affected people living in the United States and Japan, but the global bubble economy based on the overconsumption of the Earth's natural capital assets — our water, forests and soil — will affect the entire world. The challenge for our generation is to deflate the economic bubble before it bursts.

China's expanding ecological deficits are converging to create a dust bowl of historic dimensions, threatening to create millions of refugees.

Unfortunately, since Sept. 11, 2001, political leaders, diplomats and the media worldwide have been preoccupied with terrorism and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq.

Terrorism is certainly a matter of concern, but if it diverts our attention from the environmental trends undermining our future until it is too late to reverse them, Osama Bin Laden and his followers will have achieved their goal in ways they could not have imagined.

In February 2003, U.N. demographers made an announcement that was in some ways more shocking than the Sept. 11 attack: The worldwide rise in life expectancy has been dramatically reversed for a large segment of humanity — the 700 million people living in sub-Sahara Africa. The HIV epidemic has reduced life expectancy among this region's people from 62 years to 47 years, and it may soon claim more lives than all the wars of the 20th century. If this teaches us anything, it is the high cost of neglecting newly emerging threats.

The HIV epidemic is not the only emerging mega-threat. Numerous countries feed their growing populations by overpumping aquifers -- a measure that virtually guarantees a future drop in food production when the aquifers are depleted. In effect, these countries are creating a food bubble economy-one in which food production is artificially inflated by the unsustainable use of groundwater.

Other mega-threats often neglected include eroding soils and expanding deserts, which threaten the livelihood and food supply of hundreds of millions of people.

Climate change is another mega-threat that's not getting the attention it deserves from most governments, particularly that of the United States, the country responsible for a quarter of all the world's carbon emissions.

Washington wants to wait until all the evidence on climate change is in, by which time it may be too late to prevent a wholesale warming of the planet. Just as governments in Africa watched HIV infection rates rise and did little about it, the United States is watching atmospheric CO, levels rise and doing little to check the increase.

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