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Group Says Earth Can't Meet Demand

Posted on: Saturday, 23 October 2004, 03:00 CDT

Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels, the spread of cities, the destruction of natural habitats for farmland and the overexploitation of the oceans are destroying Earth's ability to sustain life, the World Wildlife Fund warned in a new report Thursday.

The biggest consumers of nonrenewable natural resources are the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Kuwait, Australia and Sweden, who leave the biggest "ecological footprint," the environmental group said in its regular Living Planet Report.

Humans currently consume 20 percent more natural resources than the Earth can produce, the report said.

"We are spending nature's capital faster than it can regenerate," WWF chief Claude Martin said in releasing the 40-page study. "We are running up an ecological debt which we won't be able to pay off unless governments restore the balance between our consumption of natural resources and the Earth's ability to renew them."

But Fred Smith, the president of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former official of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Nixon and Ford administrations, said the WWF view is "static" and fails to take into account the benefits many people get from resource use.

Use of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil increased by almost 700 percent between 1961 and 2001, the study said.

Burning fossil fuels - in power plants and automobiles, for example - releases carbon dioxide, which experts say contributes to global warming. The planet is unable to keep pace and absorb the emissions, WWF said.

Populations of land, freshwater and marine species fell on average by 40 percent between 1970 and 2000. The report cited urbanization, forest clearance, pollution, overfishing and the introduction by humans of nonnative animals, such as cats and rats, which often drive out indigenous species.

"The question is how the world's entire population can live with the resources of one planet," said Jonathan Loh, one of the report's authors.

The findings are similar to those in WWF's 2002 report, which covered the period up to 1999. But the latest study contains more detailed data stretching to 2001. It shows the situation has changed little in most countries and is now more worrying in fast-growing China and India.

Source: Augusta Chronicle, The

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