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Consider these facts. Agricultural
practices in North America today destroy topsoil at the rate
of six billion tons per year. Topsoil is the matrix of all
our lives-the lives of the plants, the animals who live on
the land and eat the plants, and the humans who eat both the
animals and the plants. It takes God and nature ten thousand
years to produce one inch of topsoil, and the typical agricultural
region contains only six inches of this precious gift. It
has been estimated that the state of Iowa, as rich a state
in healthy topsoil as any in the United States, will be a
desert by the year 2020 if the current rate of soil depletion
continues. If we will continue this abuse of the land in fifteen
years the planet's fertile land will be reduced by one-third.
This means that, even as the human population expands, the
demands for more living space and more food will increase,
yet the amount of fertile land will shrink 33 percent. Once
fertile, life-giving land will be replaced by deserts of increasing
size.
The world's forests are disappearing
at an alarming rate - one third of the planet's total will
be destroyed in the next fifteen years. Each year forest land
half the size of California vanishes. Most of this destruction
is occurring in Third World countries. First World corporations
and governments exploit these lands in order to satiate First
World appetites for beef (used in fast-food chains) and other
luxury items such as sugar, coffee, tea and cocoa. In these
forests dwell the world's most diverse species of plants,
birds, and animals. When the forests go, many of these species
will also disappear.
We know now that a species is a once-in-a-universe
event, never to be repeated. Along with the forests, birds
are disappearing. There are approximately ten million species
of living things with whom we share this planet. These creatures
range from fishes and porpoises to ash trees and rose bushes
to coyotes and lions, to dogs, cats and humans. The human
is only one of these species and, indeed, among the most recent.
Species as a whole have a life cycle - they are born and they
eventually die. In the ordinary course of events one species
disappears about every two thousand years. Currently, however,
species are disappearing at the rate of one every twenty-five
minutes. At this rate human-kind will eliminate ten percent
of the remaining species (one million of the remaining earth
creatures) in the next ten years. If current rates of destruction
continue, within the next one hundred years there will be
no living species left on this planet - including humankind,
since we are totally interdependent with all these other creatures.
(Ref. Matthew Fox, 1980)
The Triumph of the Serpent is a factual
story of a United Nations expedition in 1967 when I went to
live with some tribes in the South American rainforest. At
that time, there were 60,000 indigenous people living near
the tributaries of Rio Negro, Casiquiare and Orinoco rivers.
Today, there are only 6,000 survivors of these natives. A
negative environmental factor but important human indicator
of our current status in this planet and survival probabilities
after the year 2012 in underdeveloped countries.
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