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5. Humanity: An Agent of Global Environmental Change
Pages 49-60

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From page 49...
... As the population grows, so will the number of automobiles. In addition, the average number of automobiles per person is going up, and the number of automobiles is increasing faster than the population, particularly in developing countries.
From page 50...
... To pursue the automobile metaphor a moment longer, the same can be said for the environmental damage caused by automobiles or, for that matter, factories or other manifestations of society. For instance, the future environmental damage from automobiles depends not only on the total number of people owning them and the rate at which the number of automobiles per person increases but also on how much pollution each automobile emits.
From page 51...
... The United Nations estimates that by 2025 our numbers will increase to S.5 billion before stabilizing at over 10 billion by the end of the coming century. N~netyfive percent of the population growth will be in developing countries.
From page 52...
... Growing numbers of people cut forests for land to grow food or graze cattle, with global consequences for the hydrologic cycle, the ability of the land to sustain agricultural productivity, and the earth's genetic resources as millions of plant and animal species are driven to extinction. Growing numbers of people in industrialized and industrializing societies use energy derived from fossil fuels to travel, produce goods, and apply advanced agricultural technologies, with global consequences for atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, climate, and ecosystems.
From page 53...
... Thus carbon dioxide, the predominant greenhouse gas produced as fossil fuel is burned for energy, is disproportionately emitted as a result of energy consumed in the industrialized countries. About 40 percent of all carbon dioxide builcting up in the atmosphere is emitted from seven wealthy countries in North America and Western Europe.
From page 54...
... En Nat Z LLI O Z IN I ~ A: Z D1~ Z Z CI)
From page 55...
... The experiences of developed and developing countries alike indicate that improved standards of living-adequate shelter, fuel, and clothing, as well as access to education, health care, and employment led to a sustained reduction in birth rates. Whether this was because of improved access to birth control or greater rights for women or because with socioeconomic development parents no longer need many children to ensure financial security is a complex question.
From page 56...
... who heads the program on The Earth as Transformed by Human Action, at Clark University, points out that two types of transformations of the earth most affect the global environment: changes in how humans use the land, most notably for agriculture, and changes in industrial capabilities. Over the past three centuries or so, as the area of land used for agriculture spread and the global economy expanded, humans were increasingly prone to adapt land to suit their own purposes.
From page 57...
... Certainly, no chemist imagined that CFCs destroy the ozone layer about 25 miles above the earth, which shields us from solar ultraviolet radiation, or that CFCs contribute roughly 25 percent of the warming caused as greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere. Other examples abound of what Paul Gray, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls the "paradox of technological development." Writing in the 1989 National Academy of Engineering publication Technology and Environment, Gray observed that "New technology will be applied in ways that transcend the intentions anc!
From page 58...
... Natural gas, which currently provides about one fifth of the worId's commercial energy, generates fewer pollutants and less carbon dioxide than any other fossil fuel. Today, fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal)
From page 59...
... of industrial activity in which individual manufacturing processes take in raw materials and generate products to be sold and waste to be disposed of should be transformed "into a more Integrated model: an industrial ecosystem." Like its analog in the biological ecosystem, such an industrial ecosystem would optimize consumption of energy anct materials, minimize waste generation, and use the effluents of one process whether fly and
From page 60...
... "Global warming is a form of feedback from the earth's ecological system to the worId's economic system," MacNeill observes. "So are the ozone hole, acid rain in Europe and eastern North America, soil degradation in the prairies, deforestation and species loss in the Amazon, and many other environmental phenomena." These phenomena are the faces of global change.


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