Sustainable Village

The U.S., world's greatest consumer and greatest despoiler of natural resources, with less than 5% of the world's population, consumes a quarter of the world's energy each year. We generate 15% of the world's acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide emissions and 25% of the nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases. The average US family's consumption has 40 times the environmental impact of the average Indian family and 100 times that of the average Kenyan family.

Since 1960 our annual accumulation of trash has increased by 80%; in 1987 the US produced 160 million tons of solid waste, including an average of half a ton of residential garbage per person. Within four years, one third of our country's 6,000 landfills will be full. Despite the threat of drowning in garbage, we still recycle only 10% of our trash. By contrast, Japan recycles over 50% of its waste and Western Europe around 30%.

One of the most critical global ecological problems today is the destruction of the tropical rainforests. Over half of the Earth's original rainforest has already been destroyed forever, much of it since World War II. The current rate of destruction is close to 100 acres per minute. At that rate all of the remaining rainforest could be gone by 2050. Since rainforests contain at least half of the species on Earth, tropical deforestation is causing an "extinction spasm" in which 5-10 species are lost every day, more than at any time since the Age of Dinosaurs. The loss of the rainforests also contributes to the depletion of the ozone layer, the acceleration of the greenhouse effect, and the destabilization of weather patterns all over the world.

Among the effects of all this are massive soil erosion, the spread of deserts, the drying up of fresh water supplies, and an incalculable loss of the Earth's fertility. US consumption of wood and paper products contributes to this destruction in a major way. Logging is one of the major causes of tropical deforestation, with the US the world's second largest consumer of tropical timber products (Japan is first). We import over $2 billion worth of tropical hardwoods annually, but for every foot of tropical plywood or paneling we buy, much more forest is destroyed in the logging process: as many as ten trees may be damaged or pulled down for every commercially valuable tree removed. Each year the US imports 800 million pounds of paper from Brazil alone. If just one print run of a Sunday edition of the New York Times were printed on recycled paper, rather than virgin paper, 75,000 trees would be saved.

The Sustainable Village