ABSTRACT
It's a moving story. We are moving the earth. We humans move more earth than do volcanoes and the weather combined (Schmidt-Bleek, 1994,p 37). By moving things round we do a lot of damage. We overstress the earth's capacity safely to absorb the thousands of millions of tonnes that we return as waste or as overburden. The avalanches of matter may turn out to be the greatest threat to the global environment. ‘In the past, environmental protection has targeted nanograms. Now it's high time for us to look at the megatonnes,’ says Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek, a pioneer, along with Bob Ayres and John Young, in making materials — toxic or not — a major issue of environmental policy.
