Headlines for the past week have been dominated by large font exclamations plastered on the front page of every major newspapers and popular website as our financial markets implode. We watch with suspicion as Washington bickers about how best to rescue wealthy executives from the horror of a middle-class existence. The world waits with anxious anticipation to see if the bottom will fall out, leading to a global depression.
As an environmentalist, I watch the crisis, and the ensuring reaction, with bitter amusement. The government, with growing public support, contemplates gargantuan expenditures to save the failing ecosystem of investment banks and brokerage houses. Yet long before this current crisis, another pending ecological implosion garnered nary a yawn, let alone any real money, from politicians or citizens.
We are modifying the chemistry of our atmosphere by dumping 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year. Our earth is warming at a pace that greatly exceeds natural variation. The impacts are many. Coral reefs, for example, are extremely sensitive to any change in seawater temperatures. More than half of all coral reefs are dead or dying. We now estimate that 70 percent of all reefs will disappear in the next fifty years, largely due to global warming. Why should you care? Coral reefs provide about $375 billion worth of economic and environmental services each year. About 500 million people live within just sixty miles of a coral reef, and benefit directly from the reefs' productivity and protection they provide from the ocean's wrath. The Great Barrier Reef alone supports about 8 percent of all of the world's fish species. You eat many of them. Perhaps not for long, though, because we have depleted 90% of the species in the ocean that supply us with food.
We are destroying 40 million acres of tropical forests every year. The earth is losing up to 50,000 species annually, a rate nearly 1000 times the natural background level of natural extinction. Along with those species and habitats we lose knowledge, medicines and critical ecosystems functions.
The United States along produces 250 million tons of trash every year (49 trillion pounds). One trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide in one year, 84 billion in the United States. Those bags kill one million sea creatures annually, including birds, whales, seals, and turtles. Nearly 50 million plastic water bottles are thrown away every single day.
We are fouling our nest, destroying the resources on which we depend. Dogs do better than that.
So where is the $700 billion bailout package to avoid an environmental implosion? This ecological crisis has implications far beyond your 401k, but has no traction in Washington or on Main Street. These concerns are not theoretical. We are already witnessing a more severe drought and fire season, expansion of tropical parasites, and emergence of new diseases. We seem indifferent to toxic levels of mercury in our water, even as that liquid metal has contaminated 130 million acres of lakes and 800,000 miles of streams and rivers in the United States. We are depleting our finite sources of energy, without any commensurate investment in renewable technologies.
The ecological crisis is equally severe as the financial crisis, and with even greater implications for our quality of life. So I ask again, where is the $700 billion bailout package for the environment? Anybody home?
