Editorial Resolutions We Can Live With

Sometime in the coming weeks, when the champagne bubbles of the New Year have fizzled, when the computer bugs of Y2K have turned out to be no more annoying than a broken pencil, and the wild-eyed doomsdayers have emerged from their bunkers, we are going to have to face reality: We have 30 years left.

Despite our best efforts, humans haven't managed to destroy the planet. Not yet. Thanks to the conservation work of the past century, we have even made some progress: Population growth has slowed and will probably top out at 8 billion. Animals are being taken off the Endangered Species List. The use of ecological energy alternatives-wind, solar, hydrogen-is rising fast enough to prompt even the chairman of one major oil company to admit: "We are in the last days of oil."

That's the good news. However, talk with some of the world's foremost scientists and conservationists -as we did throughout this issue-and the forecast is not so rosy.

  • "If we continue at the current rate of deforestation and destruction . . . we will surely lose more than half of all the species of plants and animals on earth by the end of the 21st century."-E. O. Wilson, Harvard zoologist and author of Biodiversity, on page 64.

  • "It has become very difficult for anyone to argue that observed global warming is natural variability. We have good reason for being able to say that the world will be warmer in the next decade. . . . The planet is out of equilibrium."-James Hansen, chief of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

  • "How many people the earth can support depends on how those people live. If they eat like Americans, the world can only grow enough grain to support 2.5 billion of them."-Lester Brown, president of Worldwatch Institute.
How these scenarios play out depends on how we live. Wilson believes "the world environment is changing so fast that there is a window of opportunity that will close in as little time as the next two or three decades." In other words, the next 30 years could be the most significant in human history.

What can we do? Lots. As Rick Bass describes in "The Glacier Principle" (page 50), it takes millions of snowflakes to form the glaciers that carve the mountains.

This issue is filled with resources and suggestions: Drink shade-grown coffee, support urban nature groups, lower your thermostat, don't eat swordfish. These are not mind-blowing solutions; they are guidelines for how we can live. Think of them as resolutions (or re-solutions) for a new millennium. And know that if we all follow them, and teach our children to follow them, fewer species will disappear.

Lisa Gosselin
Lisa Gosselin
Editor-in-Chief

HOME 		AUDUBON