For Further Thought: Around the World 18 Times

For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care, by Steven Bouma-Prediger

progress: 98/187

In my last post I wrote about why the world is groaning, without addressing the doubts of some who might disagree as to whether it is in fact groaning at all (except perhaps in some spiritualized sense), believing instead that all or most environmental concern is misguided, misinformed or even maliciously false. I chose not to try and convince any such people, because as I mentioned before, I am not a scientist. I have read the statistics and viewed the charts of many scientists in this book, and I have chosen to believe them as true and not sensationalist, because they make logical sense to me and they jive with my experience of the physical world. I cannot argue with any who disagree with such information, but I hope their disagreement will be based on research and not reactions...it's a temptation against which we all must be on guard.

Having said that, I thought it might be of interest to list some of the statistics that I found most startling in Bouma-Prediger's chapter, entitled "What's Wrong With the World?" I appreciated his use of word-pictures which helped me to visualize the magnitude of the numbers. 

Population/Consumption

• "A newborn in the US requires twice as much grain and 10 times as much oil as a child born in Brazil or Indonesia - and produces far more pollution. In fact a simple calculation shows that the annual increase in the US population of 2.6 million people puts more pressure on the world's resources than do the 17 million people added in India each year." (Christopher Flavin, quoted on page 43)
• For a fascinating - and convicting - photographic representation of what families all around the world eat in a month, click here.

Hunger

• If you lined up all the hungry people in the world, shoulder to shoulder, they would stretch around the world (at the equator) 18.2 times. (43)

Biodiversity

• While estimates vary, a conservative estimate states that three species per day become extinct. (45)

Deforestation

• Half of the forests (our carbon-collecting air-cleaners) that once covered the earth are now gone. (47)

Water

• Approximately 25% of the total human population do not have an adequate supply of drinking water. (49)
• In California, groundwater overdraft averages 1.6 billion cubic meters per year. (Sandra Postel, quoted on pp. 50-51)
• In Arizona, water tables have dropped more than 120 meters. (ibid)
• In North Africa, current water depletion is estimated at 10 billion cubic meters per year. (ibid)
• In Mexico as well as Gaza and Israel, pumping exceeds natural recharge by more than 50%. (ibid)
• In India, water tables are falling 20 centimeters annually. (ibid)
• In Beijing, the water table has fallen 37 meters over the last four decades. (ibid)
• In Bangkok, overpumping has caused land to subside 5 to 10 centimeters a year for the past two decades. (ibid)

Land

• The US has annual ratio of 18:1 soil lost to soil formed. Nineteen million acres of rural land was "developed" between 1970 and 1990 and currently every year, 400,000 acres are lost. (52, 54)

Waste

• Each year the US generates enough solid waste to fill a bumper-to-bumper convoy of garbage trucks that would stretch around the equator almost 8 times. This amounts to 1500 pounds of waste per person per year, or 52 tons in a 70-year lifetime. And this is only 1.5 percent of the total waste generated each year in the US alone! (54)
• Each year the US throws away (municipal waste only) enough aluminum to rebuild the country's entire commercial airline fleet every three months, and enough disposable diapers, if linked end-to-end, to reach the moon and back seven times.

Energy

• The US uses approximately 1/4 of the world's available energy.

Air

• In Sweden all bodies of fresh water are now acidic, with "roughly fifteen thousand of them too sour to support life." (Bill McKibben, quoted on page 57)
• In the Adirondacks of upstate New York approximately 1/4 of the 2,759 lakes and ponds are now fishless because of acid deposition or have been damaged to the point at which fish populations have been substantially reduced. (58)

Climate

• The hottest fourteen years on record have occurred in the last two decades.
• The global mean surface temperature has been steadily rising for at least a century.
• "Already we are seeing evidence consistent with the predictions of climate change models. More intense heat waves and longer cold spells. Severe droughts and intensive flooding. More destructive storms and less controllable wild fires." (64-65)

 Well, that's probably enough downers for now. For me the challenge is to step back from looking at these statistics as shocking quotes to spice up the next conversation, but to feel the weight of them in my own life, to let the conviction settle into my heart, so that I can take action for change. Consumption is the biggest word that comes to mind - how much I as a North American consume, and to what extent that consumption robs others of even the most basic necessities. As much as I might like to, this is not an issue I can ignore.

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