Special Guest Column
PRECIOUS COMMODITIES
by Russell Ernst and Michael Beck
population committee

It's interesting the way we assign value to things. For example, rare coins have great value simply because they are scarce. "Free time" has great value to me because I have so little of it. Precious commodities to outings environmentalists like us is open space and solitude. But what bothers me is that the little bit of it we have is disappearing before my very eyes, yet very few of us are doing anything about it. I can guarantee that 10 years from now, we'll have a lot less of it than we have now.
What is the cause of the erosion of these valued resources? People. Yep, carbon copies of you & me being mass produced on a scale that should scare the hell out of you. Each day we add a quarter of a million people (250,000) to the planet. Remember when typhoons ravaged Bangladesh this year? It killed over 100,000 people. Well, we replaced those people in less than 12 hours.
California has grown from 10 million in 1950 to TRIPLE that (30 million) only 40 years later. Our annual growth rate is equal to that of Kenya, the fastest growing country in the world (4% per yr.), certainly we are witnessing graphic climatic changes: we have yet to have "summer" this year.
The u.s. growth rate of less than 1% still results in a 2.7 million increase each year, the equivalent of a new Los Angeles annually.
Air pollution does not improve in spite of relatively bold AQMD requirements. But improvements are hard to realize when you add less polluting cars to the road in overwhelming numbers. 150 cities failed to meet EPA standards. (I'll spare you discussions of traffic congestion in this article).
Landfills & sewage processing are problems that continue to plague us. Half of the cities in the u.s. will run out of landfills in 3 yrs., while the Carson sewage treatment plant provides only primary sewage treatment before pumping the stuff into the waters off Palos Verdes.
90% of our wetlands are gone already, destroyed before we really understood their role in the cycle of nature. Now high density housing, luxury hotels, or industrial sites occupy these places.
Our desert is going. It is being destroyed by off-road vehicles, high-rise casinos and resorts, hazardous waste dumps, etc.
Water shortage is not simply a Calif. problem. In 35 states ground water is being pumped out faster than the replenishment rate. Often we contaminate our drinking water because we can't handle our wastes. In Peru cholera has killed 40,000 in 3 yrs. Mexico has similar problems.
How about the animals and critters we share the planet with? Our generation has witnessed the greatest extinction since the great dinosaur disappeared. But the greatest killer is not hunting or pollution, but simply habitat destruction. Human expansion for grazing land, industry, and housing is the culprit. For every
 
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