ENVIRONMENT : Institute Says Earth’s Losses Put Us All on Shaky Ground

The Cold War is over. Most countries enjoy stable borders. International treaties and organizations provide assurances of protection. Yet an environmental group warns that virtually every government in the world faces a growing danger to its national security: environmental degradation on a scale so large that it threatens to undermine governments around the globe.

“Unless security is redefined quickly and priorities reordered accordingly, our children will face an economically impoverished and politically volatile future--a future so different from the recent past that we cannot easily imagine what it will be like,” says the 1995 “State of the World” report recently released by the Worldwatch Institute.

Rising population, over-harvesting of fish, depletion of forests and the overuse of ground-water reserves will lead to unemployment, inflation and declining productivity in many countries, the institute predicts. Those conditions, in turn, will threaten world stability, it says.

The Worldwatch Institute has issued an annual report on world conditions for 12 years. Many of the findings paint a bleak portrait of the future, although the institute does note some successes.

As examples of dwindling food supplies, the report cites a 99% reduction in the oyster harvest from Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, similar reductions in the Caspian Sea sturgeon harvest and dwindling fish species in the Black Sea.

And population growth, the report says, has forced many countries to outstrip their resources, creating “continuously rising demand and a shrinking resource base (that) can lead from stability to instability and to collapse almost overnight.”

The downward spiral has already begun in some parts of the world, the institute says, citing Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti. Another symptom, the report says, is an additional 8 million refugees registered by the United Nations since 1989.

Hilary French, associate project director, said other factors also are at work. “I think not only the environment but the lack of access to land are clearly factors that are driving people from their homes” and are placing pressures on the social support systems and environments of many nations.

Many governments are responding by spending money to contain the crises rather than by working to improve underlying conditions, she said.

Among the remedies the institute prescribes is a worldwide tax on currency exchanges to fund preservation programs. A tax of .003% could raise $8.4 billion, French said.

The authors also advocate making the United Nations more effective in preserving the environment and note that the U.N. Charter is so outdated that “neither environment nor population even appear in the document.”

The report calls for governments to adhere to the 1994 World Population Plan of Action written at a U.N. conference in Cairo. It sets a world population goal of 9.8 billion by the year 2050--the current figure is 5.6 billion--and recommends a substantial increase in spending by the year 2000 for population-control programs and to address the “underlying causes of high fertility, such as female illiteracy and the low status of women.”

Among the successes mentioned in the report are the installation of 15,000 wind turbines in California that “generate as much power as the residents of San Francisco use.”

Lee Weddig, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, said Worldwatch’s conclusions about ocean fisheries are “fairly accurate” overall. But there is more to the story, he said.

“We’ve hopefully achieved an equilibrium,” he said, adding that fish stocks shift, with some plentiful and others depleted for a time.

Luke Popovich of the American Forest and Paper Assn. said worldwide forest depletion is a problem but may be exaggerated. He also denied that it was a problem in North America.

“We cut down trees in order to protect forestry,” he said. In other nations, “they cut down trees in order to clear the land for other uses.”