From the Technology Review blog:
Yesterday the United Nations released its Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, and it does not portend good things for planet Earth, especially the developing parts of the planet.
Humans
have depleted 60 percent of the world’s grasslands, forests, farmlands,
rivers, and lakes. By now you know the litany: biodiversity is
disappearing, fisheries have collapsed, freshwater supplies are under
great threats, air and water pollution threaten health, etc.
It’s easy to argue that the solution is for developing countries to get as rich as the developed countries.
But
in our current technological state, becoming wealthy is correlated with
energy use, which in turn is correlated with greenhouse gas emissions,
which causes the granddaddy of environmental degradation, global
warming.
Indeed, it’s through such pollution that the west,
and especially the United States, has achieved its wealth and its
relatively intact/recovered ecosystems.
So how are the
developing countries to achieve this wealth without exacerbating the
problem? Green technology, and plenty of it, seems the only answer,
which is why the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is something even
technologists should be interested in.