Growing ... Growing ... Gone

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Thus far, most of the environmental damage has been locally confined: the death of the Aral Sea, the burning rain forests of Indonesia, the collapse of the Canadian cod fishery, the melting of the glaciers that supply Andean cities with water, the dust howl forming in northwestern China and the depletion of the U.S. Great Plains aquifer.

But as these regional environmental events expand and multiply, they will progressively weaken the global economy, bringing closer the day when the economic bubble will burst.

OUTSTRIPPING OUR SUPPLIES

Humanity's demands on the Earth have multiplied over the last half-century as our numbers have increased, rising from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.1 billion in 2000. In fact. human population grew more over the past 50 years than it did during the preceding 4 million years since we emerged as a distinct species.

Incomes have risen even faster than population. Income per person around the world nearly tripled from 1950 to 2000. Growth in population and the rise in incomes expanded global economic output from just under $7 trillion (in 2001 U.S. dollars) of goods and services in 1950 to S46 trillion in 2000, a gain of nearly sevenfold.

Water demands also tripled as agricultural, industrial and residential uses climbed, outstripping the sustainable supply in many countries. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry. We also are draining rivers, to the detriment of wildlife and ecosystems.

Fossil fuel use has quadrupled, setting in motion a rise in carbon emissions that is overwhelming nature's capacity to fix CO 2 pollution. As a result of this carbon-fixing deficit, atmospheric CO 2 concentrations climbed from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959 to 369 ppm in 2000.

In light of these factors, the sector of the economy likely to unravel first is food. Eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, collapsing fisheries, falling water tables and rising temperatures are converging to make it more difficult to expand food production fast enough to keep up with demand.

In 2002, the world grain harvest of 1,807 million tons fell short of world grain consumption by 100 million tons, or 5 percent. This shortfall, the largest on record, marked the third consecutive year of grain deficits, dropping grain reserves to the lowest level in a generation.

To make matters worse, farmers plow highly erodible land — land too dry or too steeply sloping to sustain cultivation — to satisfy the swelling demand. Each year billions of tons of topsoil are being blown away in dust storms or washed away in rainstorms, leaving farmers straggling to grow food for some 70 million additional people with less topsoil than the previous year.

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