Peace
Will Give Us A Chance
Anne H. Ehrlich and Paul R. Ehrlich
Stanford University, Stanford, California
Berkeley, California May 7, 1991
The first world war over resources had just been fought in the
Persian Gulf. Even though the action was confined to one region,
participation was global in scope (at least financially). And while
resources have figured in most wars, this conflict was explicitly
over access to petroleum deposits, claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
More clearly than any previous war, the Persian gulf conflict also
spotlighted the truth of a slogan originated by Another Mother for
Peace a quarter century ago:
"War is unhealthy for children and other living things."
Despite United Nations conventions opposing deliberate environmental
destruction in war (particularly the Enmod convention of 1977, signed
by the United States but not Iraq), such tactics were employed by
the Iraqi forces and may have been engaged in by the United States-led
coalition as well.1
Among the results was an unprecedented oil spill, many times greater
than the 1989 accident in Alaska's Prince William Sound (but smaller
than originally reported), which is devastating the fragile marine
ecosystem and coastal marshes of the gulf. Perhaps 30 percent of
the spilled oil was from Iraqi tankers targeted by Allied weapons;2
the rest reportedly was deliberately released by the Iraqis from
shore installations. Oil-coated bird victims (from another spill)
were shown repeatedly on television; unseen effects no doubt included
the death of coral colonies and much of their associated fish fauna.3
Cleanup efforts were slow to be initiated, and the actual origin
of the spill and details of its damaging effects remained unclear
months later.
The desert areas of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, where tanks and other
heavy military vehicles maneuvered in training and combat and where
fortifications were installed, also were severely damaged. By breaking
down the natural crust of the desert surface, the heavy vehicular
traffic has exposed the towns and cities of the area to inundation
by sand and dust. Countless animals also must have been crushed
in their subsurface burrows.4
Most destructive of all may be the detonation of more than 500
Kuwaiti oil wells, an unknown portion of which were set off by Allied
bombing. Estimates of the amount of oil being burned have ranged
from 1.5 to 6 million barrels per day (equivalent to a range of
8 percent to 32 percent of current U.S. oil consumption). The fires
are very difficult to extinguish and will continue producing millions
of tons of soot, smoke, and air pollutants (such as nitrogen and
sulfur oxides) for many months to come.5 Severe immediate health
effects of the air pollution on local populations are already clear,
long-term consequences of exposure to it may be serious.6
Possible climatic effects for the region cannot yet be ruled out.7
Black rain was reported early in Iran, along with unseasonably low
temperatures beneath the dark smoke clouds. Sharply increased acid
rain has been reported from the southern Soviet Union, and soot
particles have been detected as far away as the Mauna Loa observatory
in Hawaii.8 The potential existed for severe effects on this summer's
monsoon in South Asia, home of a billion very poor people, which
could have led to crop failures and famine on a scale overshadowing
even that caused by the disastrous typhoon flooding of Bangladesh
in May. Fortunately for South Asia, prevailing winds shifted by
June, blowing the smoke instead over less populated, wealthy Arab
nations to the southeast.9
While the war itself appeared to have a successful outcome in terms
of Allied casualties (a few hundred), its impact on Iraqi and Kuwaiti
citizens has been devastating and socially disruptive in the extreme.
Direct Iraqi casualties probably numbered over a hundred thousand.
The impact on civilians has also been great, especially in the aftermath;
a United Nations investigative team reported that the "near-apocalyptic"
destruction of Iraq's infrastructure by Allied bombing had reduced
the society to living in medieval conditions.10 Continuation of
the embargo against Iraq prolongs and worsens the impact on civilians,
who suffer most from lack of food, sanitation, and medical care;
estimates of infant deaths from malnutrition and inadequate care
range upward of 50,000.
Restoring both Iraq and Kuwait to their former levels of development
in terms of infrastructure and basic services will take years, perhaps
decades. Fortunately, both have adequate financial resources for
redevelopment, thanks to their endowments of oil, but some strain
on the world's resources will nonetheless be incurred. 11
Meanwhile, the politically volatile Middle East is far from tranquilized,
and even the main political objective - toppling Sadam Hussein from
power - has not been achieved, although he has been partially defanged
militarily.
From a broader perspective, we fear that the long-term effect of
the Persian gulf war may be to continue the diversion of capital,
both financial and human, into preparations for war. Indeed, it
seems to have given new impetus to the arms trade. Some high technology
weapons and weapons systems were glamorized as a result of their
perceived success in the conflict. Such weapons are very expensive
to build and maintain; their success also was clearly overstated.
The attractiveness they gained is already leading to a potential
new arms race in high-tech "conventional" arms for export
to developing nations and a shot in the arm for the U.S. SDI (Star
Wars) program along with some other weapons production programs.12
In short, the Persian gulf war has tended to legitimize warfare
as a reasonable means of settling international disputes, rather
than helping to raise the world's consciousness that humanity is
no longer able to afford that approach.13 George Bush's New World
Order looks only too much like the one that prevailed before World
War 11; but that was a time when wars caused relatively little environmental
damage and casualties were mainly limited to soldiers in combat
(which could be horrendous enough). Warfare in the nuclear age,
even when fought only with so-called conventional weapons, has the
potential to cause unacceptable environmental damage on a regional
or even global scale and leads to impoverishment of those who prosecute
it (winners or losers). This destructiveness has been evident to
anyone who cared to count the costs for decades, but still the lesson
seems unlearned in political circles.14
Circumstances that might lead to new conflicts are rife in today's
world. Chief among our concerns are the increasing political-economic
instability of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; persistent and
deepening poverty, political unrest, and civil war in sub-Saharan
Africa; and repression of dissent in China and elsewhere. In the
Middle East, beyond the destabilization of the recent war, heightened
political-ethnic tensions, and the plight of several million Kurdish
and Shitte refugees, rapidly worsening shortages of water are creating
tension between nations such as Israel and Jordan.15
All these problems have the effect of promoting conflict and arms
races to the detriment of the real sources of any society's security:
natural resources (including natural ecosystems), agricultural production,
political freedom, and economic stability.16 As humanity hurtles
towards a final confrontation with its own life-support systems,
people are squandering diminishing resources to fight among themselves
for their possession and control. It is a sorry spectacle.
An important (but seldom considered) underlying cause of humanity's
conflicts is continued population growth, which diminishes the resources
ultimately available for each person. The human population has increased
fourfold in this century and is destined to pass 6 billion before
the turn of the next one. Demographers tell us that, because of
the momentum built into rapidly growing populations, growth is unlikely
to halt through humane means (birth limitation) before the population
reaches 10 to 14 billion some time in the 21st or 22nd century.17
Accompanying this momentous and unprecedented population outbreak
has been an even faster rise in mobilization of energy and resources.18
Worldwide energy use, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, has
risen six-fold in only 60 years. Human mobilization of many basic
elements and materials now equals or exceeds their natural flows,
potentially disrupting or altering the great geochemical cycles
on which life depends. The explosive twentieth-century expansion
of the human enterprise has caused a similar rise in impacts on
the global environments.
The industrial revolution brought a profound shift in humanity's
means of support as well as the magnitude of its impact on the planet.19
Previously, human beings had lived mostly within their income -
the solar energy received daily at Earth's surface. Food, materials,
and energy were all derived from products of photosynthesis, directly
or indirectly, with the exception of metals, which can be recycled.
The shift to dependence on abundant (but finite) fossil fuel resources
to support a burgeoning population marked a change from living mostly
on solar income to increasing consumption of humanity's limited
supply of inherited "capital." Not only have nonrenewable
mineral resources been depleted at increasing rates, but expansion
of the human enterprise has led to a progressive degradation of
putatively renewable and indispensable resources such as agricultural
soils, groundwater, and biotic diversity.
The unsustainable nature of modem agricultural practices has been
masked in temperate-zone nations by the success of high-yield seeds,
synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides in boosting crop yields in
the short term, spectacular though the gains have often been. But
continuous plowing and planting of widespread monocultures has led
to accelerated soil erosion and a mining of nutrients from productive
soils in many areas. Heavy use of farm chemicals leads to serious
environmental problems as well. When transferred to the thinner
soils and pest-favoring climates of the tropics, however, the vulnerability
of industrial fanning becomes apparent.20 But as high-yield crops
have spread, traditional varieties have been abandoned, resulting
in a narrowing of the genetic diversity of crops. Yet that diversity
is the raw material needed for breeding improved crops for the future
- especially a future of uncertain climatic stability.21 It is difficult
to conceive of a more vital resource for maintaining food security.
But efforts to preserve rare crop varieties have not been enough
to stem the losses.
The vaunted green revolution of the 1950s-70s has nearly run its
course, and no suitable encore is on the horizon that could repeat
the record of almost tripled food production since 1950.22 The failure
of world agriculture to maintain the per-capita food production
levels of the early 1980s lends credence to the suspicion of Lester
Brown of Worldwatch Institute, among others, that global food production
increases in the 1990s may fall significantly behind the rate of
population increase.
Depletion of groundwater resources that are essential to agriculture
is underway in many nations, including the United States. The Ogallala
aquifer underlying the Great Plains is the best-known example, although
a similar story can be told in much of California. Water is being
withdrawn from underground sources to irrigate crops at rates far
faster than the aquifers can be recharged naturally. In the southern
plains and some areas of California - as well as northern India,
parts of China, and numerous other semiarid regions - the water
table has fallen so far that pumping is no longer economic. Curiously,
when the wells were installed in the Great Plains, it was well known
that the irrigation systems would be temporary; in western Kansas,
they were expected to play out by 2000.
About a third of the world's food is produced on irrigated land
today. But irrigation itself can lead over time to degradation of
the land through the accumulation of salts or waterlogging. Now,
more and more land is being taken out of production as it loses
fertility or as aquifers are depleted. Worldwide acreage of irrigated
land per person has been falling since 1979.23
The lack of suitable unused land for agriculture to occupy - as
well as a shortage of remaining virgin forests and grazing land
- indicate how extensively humanity has come to dominate the planet,
especially on land. The takeover by the human enterprise of most
of Earth's productive land areas, along with overexploitation and
damage to oceans and shore areas, is causing the greatest epidemic
of species extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million
years ago. The destruction of biotic diversity (genes, genetically
distinct populations, and species) as a side effect of human activities
is among the most serious, although least unappreciated, environmental
problems. The last quarter of the twentieth century may see the
loss of 10 percent or more of the world's inventory of species as
habitats continue to disappear under buildings, highways, airports,
and the plow - or are overgrazed or poisoned by various pollutants.
A loss of 20 to 25 percent by 2025 is likely, unless a concentrated
global effort is made to preserve what habitats remain.24 Of course,
unless efforts are also made to avert rapid climate change, even
the most strenuous preservation efforts might be in vain.25
Tropical forests are by far the richest reservoirs of biodiversity,
containing at least half of all the species on Earth. But tropical
forests are under unprecedented assault, vanishing at a rate of
nearly 2 percent per year in the late 1980s, twice as fast as a
decade earlier.26 Other biotically rich ecosystems are also severely
threatened: wetlands, estuaries, coral reefs, subtropical and temperate
forests.
Why should we care about the loss of biodiversity? The first reason
is that most people appreciate nature or some parts of it esthetically;
they enjoy flowers, trees, gardens, and house plants, birdwatching,
collecting butterflies, keeping tropical fishes in aquaria, and
so forth. Many people also subscribe to the essentially moral belief
that other organisms have a right to exist and human beings have
no right to extinguish them heedlessly.27
Economics also provides strong arguments; the activities associated
with appreciating nature obviously bring economical benefits, but
untapped resources still exist in nature that could be of enormously
greater economic value. One recent discovery was that the bark of
an already rare yew tree in the threatened old-growth forests of
the Pacific Northwest contained a substance of value in treating
certain cancers.28 Tropical forests in particular have barely been
explored as sources of potential foods, medicines, industrially
useful chemicals, oils, fibers, and other materials, although their
potential is vast and they have already yielded innumerable such
items. Indeed, it should be remembered that the very basis of civilization
originated in nature's vast genetic library: all our crop and livestock
species, medicines, traditional fuels, and materials for clothing,
housing, and furniture. To the degree that we heedlessly allow species-rich
ecosystems to disappear unheralded, we are in effect throwing away
the keys to our future.
But the most compelling reason for preserving natural ecosystems
and the organisms that comprise them is also the least understood
by the public: they are our life-support systems and provide a series
of indispensable free services to civilization.29 These services
are mostly taken for granted, although people may notice when they
have been damaged or overwhelmed. Nor can society adequately replace
or substitute for most of the services; in cases where we might
know how to do so, we could not possibly afford it on the required
scale.
What are these extraordinary services? First, natural systems help
to main min the quality of the atmosphere, including the benign
mix of gases present. The oxygen that we are fond of breathing is
a product of the activities of photosynthesizing organisms over
billions of years. Living organisms have much to do with moderating
and stabilizing climates over most of the planet, especially on
land. They also help to maintain the balance of greenhouse gases
that keep the surface habitably warm (but not too warm). In particular,
ecosystems participate in regulating the hydrological cycle which
supplies fresh water and is crucial for all terrestrial life (and
for agriculture). Forested watersheds recycle rain and retain water,
recharging aquifers and releasing surface water slowly and steadily
in streams. Loss of the forest often results in increased floods
and droughts downstream; streams become less dependable and some
even dry up entirely.
Organisms in natural ecosystems also participate in and maintain
the natural geochemical cycles that restore vital nutrients to soils
and aquatic systems, disposing of wastes in the process. They control
the vast majority of pests and pathogens that potentially could
plague our crops and ourselves, and pollinate myriad plants (enabling
them to reproduce), including numerous crops. Finally, natural ecosystems
constitute nature's vast "genetic library" - the inventory
of millions of species and billions of genetically distinct populations
of organisms from which humanity has already drawn the very basis
of its civilization and which could provide undreamed-of future
benefits if we have the wit to preserve it.
Far from protecting the integrity of natural ecosystems, however,
humanity has taken over the land surface of the planet, replacing
natural systems with simplified, artificial ones managed for its
own benefit. At some level of exploitation, human beings have occupied
or used some two-thirds of the land surface, at least 40 percent
of it intensively (as habitation, agriculture, or pasture).
Reflecting this dramatic takeover, some 40 percent of all the potential
energy fixed in the process of photosynthesis by green plants on
land is being directly consumed by people and livestock, diverted
into human-controlled systems (supporting a different set of organisms
than would naturally be present), or has been lost as natural systems
were convened into less productive ones (forests to farms or pastures;
savannas and grasslands to deserts).30 This appropriation and degradation
of the energy resource on which human beings (as well as all other
animals) are ultimately dependent goes far to explain the epidemic
of extinctions now underway, as both living space and food resources
for other organisms are lost to human competition. The degree of
takeover also indicates a limit to the scope for further expansion
of a species that "plans" to redouble its population in
the next several decades.31
Environmental problems arising from human activities, once local,
or at most regional, in the last decade or two have become global
in impact, threatening everyone's security. Human activities pose
real dangers of disrupting, perhaps beyond repair, the functioning
of the remaining ecosystems through such assaults as stratospheric
ozone depletion, widespread acid deposition, and the buildup of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Ozone depletion was recently found to be progressing twice as fast
as expected in the northern midlatitudes (which includes most of
the United States, Europe, and Japan, and much of the USSR, the
Middle East, India, and China) and already causing significant amounts
of dangerous ultraviolet-B radiation to reach the surface. As a
global problem, the cause of ozone depletion is quite well understood
- a limited range of human-made chemical compounds (mainly chlorofluorocarbons
- CFCs) released into the atmosphere. It is also clear that responsibility
for releasing them rests mainly with the industrialized nations
which will be able to supply less damaging substitutes for their
principal uses (refrigeration, air conditioning, and as solvents)
at minor economic cost. Unprecedented international cooperation
in the late 1980s led to a convention to phase out production of
CFCs although the recent discovery of escalating damage may require
a second acceleration of the timetable.32
The capacity for disruption of natural and agricultural systems
by acid deposition, occurring widely in industrialized nations and
at least a potential threat in many developing regions, is generally
underappreciated. Acidification develops slowly and insidiously,
often going unnoticed until exhaustion of a system's natural buffering
capacity causes symptoms to appear almost overnight. Aquatic systems
are especially vulnerable, and the flora and fauna of thousands
of lakes and streams in northern and central Europe and the eastern
United States have been severely injured or killed by acidity. Many
forests in those regions too have suffered damage, decline, and
even complete destruction, largely attributed to gradual acidification,
possibly interacting with other air pollutants and natural stresses.33
Much of the world's productive land and many aquatic systems have
been severely (and for practical purposes irreversibly) affected,
at an annual cost to society of many billions of dollars in damage
to agriculture, fisheries, and forests. Even wider areas unquestionably
will suffer damage as more and more vulnerable systems succumb to
cumulative acidification. While the acid deposition problem has
not needed global action, it does require cooperation between nations
whose air pollutants have crossed borders and caused damage - such
as Canada and the United States and more than a dozen European nations.
Global warming may pose the gravest threats of the three main planet-wide
problems, since the climate change that it is expected to induce
most likely will affect every part of the planet. Agricultural and
natural systems alike are closely adjusted to the prevailing climatic
regime in which they evolved; relatively small shifts in temperature
and precipitation patterns (which cannot be predicted in detail
for particular areas) can be remarkably disruptive. In already decimated
natural ecosystems, widespread extinctions and other irreversible
consequences may result. Even though climate changes will not necessarily
be adverse everywhere, the disruption caused in the short term by
the rapidity of change for natural, agricultural, and social systems
may at least temporarily overshadow any longer-term benefits. In
addition, shifts in climate are unlikely to be one-time affairs;
change will be continuous, but possibly not always unidirectional
(unless, by some miracle, the greenhouse gas buildup is halted and
the system quickly reaches equilibrium).34
Global warming may also be the most intractable global problem
for several reasons besides the uncertainties surrounding its progress.
One is that it has a multitude of
causes and culprits, being tightly connected to such vital and
pervasive activities as energy use (mainly fossil fuels) and agriculture.
Every society contributes emissions of the greenhouse gases that
are building up in the atmosphere: carbon dioxide and other gases
from combustion of fossil fuels or wood; methane and nitrous oxide
largely from agriculture and land-clearing; and CFCs.
Obviously, the plethora of greenhouse-gas sources raises many difficult
questions of assigning responsibility and greatly complicates the
task of reducing emissions. So the policies needed, both to mitigate
the effects of warming and adjust to them, will also necessarily
be numerous. Fortunately, a start has been made on eliminating CFCs,
among the most potent, long-lasting greenhouse gases. Although it
was done to protect the stratospheric ozone shield, the greenhouse
benefits will be scarcely less valuable.
Excess carbon dioxide emissions are caused mostly by combustion
of fossil fuels, but a quarter to a third are considered due to
deforestation, primarily in the tropics, an activity that nearly
doubled in rate in the 1980S.35 While developing nations have so
far made modest contributions to the carbon-dioxide buildup through
fossil-fuel-burning, their fast-growing populations and development
ambitions, including substantial rises in per-capita energy use,
guarantee a growing share of any energy policy change in the rich
countries.36
Methane emissions arise not only from combustion but from rice
cultivation, flatulence of cattle, and landfills; nitrous oxide
releases are associated with fertilizer use and land-use changes.
Curbing emissions of these gases in a world with a rapidly growing
population with rising food needs will be no easy task.
The diversity of measures required to slow the rate of global warming
(thereby allowing adjustments to be made) will have to be implemented
through different economic sectors and by governments of all nations
which have enormously varying levels of development, wealth, resource
endowments, and capacities to carry out policies. Thus important
questions about international equity are raised by the complexity
of the global warming issue, both in allocating responsibility for
causing it and for managing it. Hammering out the Montreal Protocol
to phase out CFCs was simple by comparison - and even that has proven
inadequate.
With the emergence of global environmental problems demanding global,
or at least international, solutions, a new form of interdependence
had developed, paralleling that of increasing economic interdependence
among nations and the less-appreciated dependencies of the food
trade. No society today is sufficiently isolated from the rest that
major breakdowns or conflicts can be viewed with equanimity. The
world's interdependence now is such that the reduction of Iraq to
destitution impoverishes us all.
In this light, the Persian Gulf War, which both highlighted and
was precipitated by the global nature of trade in energy resources,
was clearly a step backward in building the interdependency that
will be increasingly essential for supporting an ever-larger human
population. That the war itself, in merely six weeks, caused an
unprecedented set of environmental impacts might have brought the
message home more clearly - if that information had ever been properly
conveyed to the public.37
Nations nevertheless still perceive a need for military power,
a perception that it is not independent of the deteriorating resource-environment
situation. Even as the chance of a global nuclear war growing out
of the East-West confrontation diminishes, the probabilities of
regional wars over resources (oil, water) or even environmental
issues (acid precipitation, failure to abate greenhouse gas emissions)
are rising. Thus the approaching ecological Armageddon could make
it increasingly difficult to reallocate resources from military
to environmental security. Indeed, the very process of preparing
for combat - let alone engaging in it - adds to our environmental
peril.38
Environmental security is a life-and-death issue for all peoples;
degradation of the human resource base poses threats, at the most
basic level, to world food supplies as well as directly to human
health and well-being. Worldwide cooperation and reallocation of
financial resources far beyond precedent will be required from now
on to manage the world's affairs. The world community's principal
task of the next century will not only be to deal with the immediate
common threats (global warming, ozone depletion, depletion of natural
resources, and biotic impoverishment) but also to bring the human
juggernaut into balance with its resources and the biosphere. In
doing this, the scale of the human enterprise - the size of the
population, its global mobilization of resources, the technologies
it uses, and their impacts on the biosphere - must be unflinchingly
addressed as the underlying driving force behind both the environmental
threats to global security and resource-based conflicts.
Recognition is needed that those conflicts only lead to an acceleration
of environmental degradation and global impoverishment. Conflicts
indeed must be avoided if the means are to be made available to
contain the population-resource-environment crisis. People frequently
speak of "giving peace a chance." We believe that the
wording should be different:
Only peace will give us a chance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
The full name of the Enmod convention is the "Convention on
the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental
Modification Techniques." Other applicable agreements include
Protocol I of the 1977 Additions to the Geneva Convention of 1949,
which prohibits military attacks on the natural environment and
on manmade works containing dangerous world forces such as dams,
dikes, and nuclear reactors; and the 1982 Charter for Nature, which
holds that "nature should be secured against degradation caused
by warfare or other hostile activities." The United States
has so far not signed either of these two, possibly because they
would in effect outlaw the use of nuclear weapons.
Associated Press, March 199 1.
Charles Sheppard and Andrew Price, 199 1, "Will marine life
survive the Gulf war?" New Scientist, (9 March, pp. 36-40).
Constance Holden, 199 1, "Kuwait's unjust deserts: damage to
its deserts," Science, 251:1175 (8 March) .
Carl Pope, 199 1, "War on Earth," Sierra (May-June, pp.
54-58); John Horgan, "Up in flames," Scientific American
(May, pp. 17-24); Christopher Joyce and Dan Charles, 1991, "The
battle to stop the Gulf from choking," New Scientist, 23 March,
pp. 20-21; Richard D. Small, 199 1, "Environmental impact of
fires in Kuwait," Nature, vol. 350, pp. 11-12 (7 March).
John H. Cushman, Jr., 1991, "The environmental toll is mounting
in Kuwait as oil-well fires bum on," New York Times, (June
25).
Marlise Simons, 1991, "British study disputes lengthy climatic
role for Kuwait oil fires," New York Times (April 16).
John Horgan, 199 1, "Burning questions," Scientific American,
July, pp. 17-22.
Matthew L. Wald, 1991, "No global threat seen from Kuwait Oil
Fires," New York Times (June 25).
Anthony Lewis, 1991, "What we have wrought, " New York
Times (March 29) *
Steven Greenhouse, 199 1, "Rebuilding troubled regions will
strain world finances." New York Times (March 26); Patrick
E. Tyler, 1991, "U.S. official believe Iraq will take years
to rebuild," New York Times (June 3); Alan Cowell, 1991, "Malnutrition
ravages children of an Iraqi city," New York Times (June 1).
Newsweek, 1991, "Arms for sale" (April 8, pp. 22-29).
Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, 1991, Healing the Planet, Addison-Wesley,
New York.
Bernard Nietschmann, E.W. Pfeiffer, and Vo Quy, 1990, "The
ecology of war and peace, (a collection of short articles on the
environmental costs of recent wars from Vietnam to Nicaragua)",
Natural History, November, pp. 34-49.
Joyce R. Starr, 1991, "Water wars," Foreign Policy No.
82 (spring), pp. 17-36.
For a clear description of this view, see Peter H. Gleick, 199 1,
"Environment and security: the clear connections," Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists (April, pp. 17-21).
United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), 1991, The
State of World Population 1991, UNFPA, New York.
John P. Holdren, 1990, "Energy in transition," Scientific
American, 263:3 (September, pp. 156-163).
Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, 1990, The Population Explosion,
Simon & Schuster, New York.
Anne H. Ehrlich, 1988, "Development and agriculture" (pp.
75- 100), and David Pimentel, "Industrialized agriculture and
natural resources" (pp. 53-74), in P.R. Ehrlich and J.P. Holdren
(eds.), The Cassandra Conference, Texas A & M University Press,
College Station.
William K. Stevens, 1991, "Loss of genetic diversity imperils
crop advances," New York Times (June 25); Robert E. Rhoades,
1991, "The world's food supply at risk," National Geographic,
179:4 (April, pp. 74-105).
Lester R. Brown, et al., 1990, State of the World 1990, W.W. Norton,
New York.
Sandra Postel, 1990, "Saving water for agriculture," pp.
39-58, in L.R. Brown, et al.
E.O. Wilson (ed.), 1988, Biodiversity, National Academy Press, Washington,
D.C.
Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 199 1.
Norman Myers, 1990, "Deforestation Rates in Tropical Forests
and Their Climatic Implications," Friends of the Earth, London.
Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, 198 1, Extinction: The Causes
and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species, Random House,
New York.
G. Kolata, 199 1, "Tree yields a cancer treatment, but ecological
costs may be high," New York Times, May 13; T. Egan, 1991,
"Carving out a market for Oregon's yew tree," New York
Times, May 31, 1991.
Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 198 1.
P.M. Vitousek, P.R. Ehrlich, A.H. Ehrlich, and P.A. Matson, 1986,
"Human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis,"
BioScience, vol. 36, no. 6 (June), pp. 368-373.
UNFPA, 199 1, The State of World Population 199 1.
Richard Benedick, 1991, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions for Safeguarding
the Planet, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
For good general discussions of these effects, See World Resources
Institute (WRI), 1986, World Resources 1986 (Basic Books, New York)
and Fred Pearce, 1990, "Whatever happened to acid rain?"
New Scientists, 15 September, pp. 57-60.
For a general discussion of the possible impacts and extensive references,
see Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1991, Healing the Planet, or Stephen Schneider,
1989, Global Warming; Entering the Greenhouse Century, Sierra Club
Books, San Francisco.
Norman Myers, 1989, Deforestation Rates in Tropical Forests and
Their Climatic Implications, Friends of the Earth, London.
Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, 1989, "How the rich can
save the poor and themselves," in S. Gupta and R. Pachuri (eds.)
Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Warming and
Climate Change: Perspectives from Developing Countries, Tata Energy
Research Institute, New Delhi (21-23 February, pp. 287-294).
See articles by John Horgan in Scientific American cited earlier.
Anne H. Ehrlich and John Birks (eds), 1990, Hidden Dangers: The
Environmental Consequences of' Preparing for War, Sierra Club Books.
Introducing: Anne H. Ehrlich and Paul R. Ehrlich
Dr. Paul Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies, Department
of Biological Studies, Stanford University. A member of the Stanford
faculty since 1959, he is known internationally for his research
on ecological and evolutionary interactions of plants and herbivores,
and particularly for his pioneering work on human ecology and population.
He is the author of more than 500 scientific papers and articles
in the popular press, and some 30 books. Dr. Ehrlich has numerous
affiliations and honors including Honorary President of Zero Population
Growth, and President of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.
Anne H. Ehrlich is a senior research associate in biology and associate
director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford, teaching
a course in environmental policy for the University's Human Biology
Program since 1981. She has written extensively on issues of public
concern such as population control, environmental protection, and
environmental consequences of nuclear war. She has served on the
White House Council on Environmental Quality and on the University
of California's Food Task Force. In 1988, she was elected an Honorary
Fellow in the California Academy of Sciences, serving on the editorial
board of its journal, Pacific Discovery. In 1989, she was selected
for The United Nations' Global 500 Roll of Honour for Environmental
Achievement.
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