Message-ID: <007b01bdf2d3$e8dd9960$cbf4fea9@jay98> Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1998 05:52:52 -1000 From: Jay Hanson <mailto:j@QMAIL.COM> Subject: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
The past decade has been critical for the environmental sciences because of developments in three major areas, according to Paul R. Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford and president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.Ehrlich reviewed what has happened in those areas - human population growth, impact on the biosphere, and scientific efforts to overcome the problems of achieving sustainable growth - in a lecture he delivered on Sept. 25 in Amsterdam.
The speech was part of the ceremonies presenting Ehrlich with the $125,000 H. P. Heineken Prize for Sciences by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Here is part of Ehrlich's speech:
"To put this in context, you must remember that estimates of the long-term carrying capacity of Earth with relatively optimistic assumptions about consumption, technologies, and equity (A x T), are in the vicinity of two billion people. Today's population cannot be sustained on the 'interest' generated by natural ecosystems, but is consuming its vast supply of natural capital -- especially deep, rich agricultural soils, "fossil" groundwater, and biodiversity -- accumulated over centuries to eons. In some places soils, which are generated on a time scale of centimeters per century are disappearing at rates of centimeters per year. Some aquifers are being depleted at dozens of times their recharge rates, and we have embarked on the greatest extinction episode in 65 million years."
Read Ehrlich's entire Heineken speech at http://dieoff.com/page157.htm
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