ABSTRACT
People in every industrialized country have daily contact with pollution
problems: Climate gas emissions are already almost certainly the
cause of most extreme weather events. Between 80 and 90% of
all cases of cancer are influenced by environmental factors and the
prevalence of allergies is rapidly increasing. At the same time,
the rate of extinction of animal and plant species is accelerating –
between 1900 and 1950 one species each year disappeared, while in
1990 alone, between one and three species disappeared every hour.
Species have always died out and new ones have appeared, but the
rate of extinction today is 100 to 1000 times greater than the natural
rate (Lawton and May, 1995).
