In 1940 New York was the world's largest city, with 7.4 million inhabitants. By 1997 it had dropped to tenth, replaced by Seoul, South Korea's, 10.2 million residents. The global population has grown rapidly in the past 50 years. Consequentially, humanity's impact on the environment is increasing.
When George Washington said farewell to his troops at Fraunces Tavern in New York city, the world had 800,000 inhabitants; when Bobby Thompson hit the homer that sunk the Dodgers in 1951, that figure had grown to 2 1/2 billion. The world's population is right now bucking up against seven billion. Can the planet sustain that kind of growth? All the signs point to a resounding NO.
By Steve Running, NASA's Earth Observation System
It is the moral imperative of our generation to pass on to our children and grandchildren a world that is equal in habitability to the world our parents gave to us. The problem is that as the global population passes 7 billion people, even if individual resource consumption stayed constant, impacts on the biosphere will increase.
However, we seem to be living in bigger houses, driving fancier cars, and flying off to more vacations than our parents did. So per capita resource consumption is not staying constant at all, but increasing. And the developing world is desperately trying to catch up to these living standards of the developed countries. Many developing countries are also making the same mistakes of "development at whatever the environmental cost" that we made 30 years ago. We learned back then that rivers catching on fire and air pollution that forces schoolchildren to stay in at recess is unacceptable. The progress in cleaning up regional pollution in the United States has been remarkable in the last few decades. But now at the end of the 1990s, as we see a globalized economy, we also now see a globally interconnected environment.
Documenting and monitoring biospheric health, just like human health, should not be a political topic. Biospheric health, and more specifically the sustainability of human life on planet Earth, is a topic that cuts across liberals and conservatives, republicans and democrats. We all want the best for our grandchildren, and to pass on to them a livable world. However, until now, global biospheric health has been largely unmeasurable, so discussions and policy development have been handicapped by a paucity of data.
The purpose of EOS is to provide this factual information on trends of change in our biosphere. How we interpret these data, and the course of action we embark on in the next millennium will be a critical political topic. If global change trends turn out to be relatively modest, then only small adjustments in social behavior may be necessary. However if impacts appear to be harmful and accelerating at an unpredictable pace, how can we ignore these early warnings in good conscience? It is essential the new political discussion be based on facts, not conjecture. These are lofty, long range, visionary objectives, similar intellectually to searching for other life in the universe. But global habitability has more immediate significance to us all. Let us hope that EOS allows us to start the new millennium with an enlightened understanding of the changing biosphere.
