ABSTRACT
Let’s start with the bad news first. Simply put, ours is a small and much-abused planet. We have so degraded our environment, so disrupted our biosphere, so stressed physical carrying capacities that the lives of millions of people on the planet (certainly our cherished “ways of life”) are at risk. The litany of contemporary environmental horrors is now familiar, even to grade-school children: ozone depletion; global warming; acid rain; chemical pollution of groundwater; the startling and escalating rate of loss of bird, animal, and plant species; tropical deforestation; increasingly massive and deadly chemical, oil, and toxic spills; and the list could go on for several pages. The daily newspapers are filled with a barrage of bad news, all of it larger than life. We hear how many acres of trees are felled in the Amazon between the time of our morning coffee and our evening meal (over 1,500 acres on an average day); we are told, with uncomfortable precision, how many of us will be likely to develop skin cancer in the coming decades, and how many of us will die from it (more than 6,500 a year in the USA alone); we are mesmerized by images of the ozone hole over the Antarctic pulsating in astral colors.
