ABSTRACT
Environmentalism, or the philosophy that demands more of policymaking nationally and regionally as well as globally, has received such an amount of political attention in the first decade of the twenty-first century that one needs to have a basic picture of the most fundamental global ecological problems. In this chapter we shall employ a unified database to map the basics of the global environmental predicament today, namely the Living Planet Report 2008. The fact that it has been compiled by a number of established environmental organizations does not remove the need to discuss the data in it widely and perhaps also to improve upon them.
