Study Urges ‘Revolution’ Dedicated to Global Cleanup : Environment: Research group calls for dramatic change in lifestyles. It seeks a crash program to battle pollution, alter economies.

The world will degrade into a virtually uninhabitable sphere littered with “economic decline and social instability” unless a global environmental cleanup effort is undertaken soon, says a report issued Saturday by the research group Worldwatch Institute.

The group’s annual “state of the world” report urges individuals, corporations and governments worldwide to fashion “an environmental revolution” on the order of the earlier industrial and agricultural revolutions.

“The issue is not our survival as a species, but rather the survival of civilization as we know it,” Lester R. Brown, president of Worldwatch, said in the report.

“But if the environmental revolution is to succeed, it must be compressed into a few decades. It will need the support of far more people than it now has.”

The study, “State of the World 1992,” says the global environment’s future depends on a dramatic change in lifestyles. For instance, the report calls for people around the world to lobby their governments for “a national ban on the use of throwaway beverage containers, the creation of a bicycle-friendly local transportation system (and) the adoption of a national population stabilization policy.”

The group says the world’s future depends on a shift to smaller families in order to reassert a balance between population and the natural systems on which it depends.

The study notes that the world population grows by about 92 million people each year. But according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the amount of grain available per person has been declining since 1984, especially in poor countries where grain is a major food.

“The decline in living conditions that was once predicted by some ecologists from the combination of continuing rapid population growth, spreading environmental degradation and rising external debt has become a reality for one-sixth of humanity,” said Brown.

Worldwatch is a private environmental research organization supported by foundations and the United Nations Population Fund. The group issued its first “state of the world” report in 1984.

The report issued Saturday called for radical restructuring of worldwide economic systems, citing a World Bank calculation that average income during the 1980s declined in more than 40 Third World countries with a combined population of 800 million people.

Worldwatch called for an end to the use of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, and development of new solar energy systems. The report said that despite the creation of national environmental protection agencies in about 115 countries and passage of thousands of laws, the world’s environment continues to deteriorate.

In particular, Worldwatch cited a recent report in the American Journal of Public Health revealing that Southern California’s polluted air causes thousands of children in the Los Angeles basin to have damaged respiratory systems by age 10. Worldwatch also noted that 300,000 people are suffering from radiation sickness stemming from nuclear accidents in the former Soviet Union.

The study notes that the ozone shield in heavily populated latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere is thinning twice as fast as earlier thought. It also cites estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency that there will be at least 200,000 additional U.S. deaths from skin cancer over the next 50 years because of the thinning ozone layer.

“Muddling through will not work,” the report concludes. “Either we turn things around quickly or the self-reinforcing internal dynamic of the deterioration-and-decline scenario will take over. The policy decisions we make in the years ahead will determine whether our children live in a world of development or decline.”