Scientists Issue Call for Action on World’s Environmental Problems

Increasing environmental problems--from global climate changes to beaches fouled with medical wastes--demand reinvigorated environmental activism, several leading scientists said Saturday at Stanford University.

The call to action came at a student-run conference, coincidentally held on the 20th anniversary of the Santa Barbara oil spill, at which scientific, political and business leaders debated how to jointly contend with the world’s worsening environmental state.

Throughout the first day of the two-day meeting, speakers repeatedly warned that established assumptions about consumption and need are pushing the world toward environmental crisis, despite many effective environmental programs begun over the last 20 years.

‘Addiction to Growth’

“We have a severe addiction to growth without asking what kind we need and what kind we can afford,” said David Brower, founder and chairman of the Earth Island Institute.

“It’s time to stop looking at things in terms of (getting) more or less” than others, said Joan Martin-Brown of the United Nations Environmental Program. “What we need to look at is not what we want, but what we need to live in dignity.”

Others urged conference members to educate people to problems before they become crises, and support politicians who are pro-active on issues.

Washington University, St. Louis, botanist Peter Raven, secretary of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, began the conference by warning that ignorance, indifference, poverty and greed are producing interrelated problems that threaten to radically alter Earth for the worse over the next 50 years.

“There is evidence all around us that the world is changing in ways that deeply disturb us,” he said. “Unless we change, the world we leave our children and grandchildren will only vaguely resemble the world we know today.”

Debt Is a Factor

Crushing Third World foreign debt, for example, encourages peasants to cut and burn tropical rain forests as a way to survive, he and others noted. This worsens atmospheric changes, hurts global resource supplies and prevents research into the possible uses of plants and animals before their extinction--all of which harm the nations benefitting from the debt.

Such problems require global answers because local laws often only displace environmental degradation, he said. In particular, he cited efforts by wealthy nations to ship toxic and hazardous wastes to underdeveloped countries.