Will Earth survive man?

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Will Earth survive man?

A planetary life or death struggle is unfolding

A brutal life or death struggle is taking place each day everywhere on this planet.

At times, it is invisible, as when a plant species, with its set of irreplaceable genes, disappears forever from an Amazon forest. Other times, it is painfully visible: a man chokes to death in a Mexico City subway, killed by a pollution-triggered asthma attack; the face of a New York woman is disfigured by skin cancer, one of 200,000 such cases predicted to occur over the next decades by the thinning of the protective ozone layer around the Earth. turning into dust. One million species may be extinct by the year 2000; a cure for AIDS or cancer or heart attacks may be lost forever with their genes.

Dirty water kills 25,000 people every day in developing countries. Air pollution makes people sick in the developed world. Lakes and forests are destroyed. In developing countries, the poor continue to damage an already frail environment in order to survive. Third world cities burst at the seams, their populations fleeing exhausted countrysides. Tropical forests, the Earth's greatest genetic reservoir, are being cut for fuel, agriculture or highways.

Much of the destruction is irreversible.

The warming of the Earth is well under way and only a cut to the bone in energy consumption in the world's richest countries will slow it.

The loss of the ozone layer is expected to continue at an alarmingly rapid pace for a generation or so, in spite of the recent UN-inspired protection treaty. In the past few weeks, ozone loss has been found to be three times greater than thought when a Protocol to cut production of ozone-damaging substances entered into force in January 1988.

Environmental consequences are long-range and incredibly complex--once a chain reaction starts in nature, it cannot be stopped cold. A chlorine molecule released today by a refrigerator in Bangkok or London can remain in the stratosphere for a century, destroying tens of thousands of ozone molecules.

But the knowledge of irreparable destruction should not paralyze us. Instead, it should propel each of us into action.

ACTION TO SAVE OUR ENVIRONMENT

Action is what the United Nations is taking in view of the environmental challenge. Sixteen years ago, as a result of the first world conference on the environment, held in Stockholm, under United Nations auspices, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was founded.

UNEP is the environmental conscience of the UN system. The small, innovative body is a catalyst: its mission is not to do, but to provoke others into thinking and doing.

UNEP is not a big bureaucracy. It has a tiny professional staff (180 people), a modest annual budget ($45 million), and no enforcement power, so it cannot tell other UN agencies what to do.

Yet, after "quite a tense beginning", as one high UNEP official puts it, the agency has been extremely successful at prodding and persuading international giants such as the...