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The

TheEnvironment
EnvironmentOf
OfTomorrow
Tomorrow
(Martin W. Holdgate)
Martin W. Holdgate is director general of “The World Conservation
Union”(IUCN) in Gland,Switzerland. This article is adopted from a lecture
given for the David Davies Memorial Institute Of International Studies.
• Earth is the scene of constant change. The summits of Jura Mountains in
Switzerland, more than 1,500 meters above present sea level, are form of
limestone laid down as soft sediments in the bed of a warm and shallow sea about
175 million years ago. There were once forests in Antartica and Dinosaurs and Ice
Sheets in England. Such changes will always occur. Some of today’s seas will be
squeezed out of existence by collision of continents to form new mountain range,
as the Himalayas are being shaped by the collisions of India and Asia.
Jura Mountains in Switzerland
• The Arctic Ice may expand again, providing the ultimate solution to the
architechtural problems of Europe and North America. Life forms will continue to
evolve and drive their predecessors toward the extinction that is the ultimate fate
of every species. On a longer time horizon, as astronomer Fred Hoyle has put it,
”We shall certainly be roasted” when the sun emerges from its present stable
phases and expands to engulf and vaporize the earth.
Prehistoric Animals in Ice Age
• Throughout history, people have adopted perforce to the cycle of the changing
earth and, where those changes have proceeded slowly have probably hardly
noticed them. Even natural catastrophes, such as massive floods and volcanic
eruptions like that of Mount Vesuvius in 78 and 79 A. C., thought they left scars on
the body of civilization, had only a local impact on its progress.
• Until the last 10,000 years, our species was a relatively uncommon animal, slowly
increasing in numbers and extending its range to reach a total global population of
about 500 million by 1,000 A. D.
Mt. Vesuvius
• Changes in ecological systems have been an inevitable results of
development. As agricultural method become more dependable, people not
directly involved in the business of subsistence were able to create objects
and ideas that enriched the total community. Such craftmen applied
increasing skill to the use non-living resources in buildings, metal, goods and
other artifacts and transformed areas of the physical environment with
mines, quarries and other structures. As people began to smelt metals, the
movement of these elements through the biosphere inevitably increased,
just as their agricultural and fuel burning habits increased the fluxes of
carbon, nitrogen and sulfur. Development, by permitting the dominance of
our species, has inevitably altered the world both by nature and the scale of
the transformations involved.
• As the World Conservation Strategy, prepared in 1980 by the World Conservation
Union (IUCN) in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund and United Nations
Environment Programme, makes plain. Development has been essential to the
evolution and expansion of human civilizations, and more will be needed to help
millions of people escape from today’s poverty and squalor and to feed
tomorrow’s added billions.
• We need something different. To use today’s catch word, we need development
that is sustainable – that is, it must not overcrop soil, pastures, forest, or fisheries
or create products that spread from a beneficial activity, like agriculture, the supply
of drinking water, or the stability of the world’s ecosystems.
• When we demand that development should be sustainable, We must be clear
about our meaning. We do not mean that growth within a human activity, such as
the cultivation of new land, must be capable of indefinite extrapolation-little such
growth will be.
• As we look for the possibilities of sustainable development, we would be wise to remind
ourselves of three basic features of the earth as habitat. First, the earth is a rather small
planet with finite resources, and it receives a finite amount of energy from the sun. It’s living
and non-living systems have interacted overtime to create the habitats within which
humanity evolved. Interactions between living and non-living elements still operate in a
fashion that regulates the overall environment in a manner analogous to the self-regulatory
mechanism of a living being.
• Second, 70% of the Earth’s surface is ocean, used only to a very limited extent by land
animals. Although the plants in the sea fix about as much carbon annually as do those on
land, humans only take from the sea about 100 to 120 million tons of assorted fishery
products annually.
• Third, land will remain highly heterogeneous as habitat. People living in different regions
cannot expect to enjoy anything approaching environmental equality. It will always be easier
to live comfortably off the arid sands of the desert or the dry grasslands of the savannas. The
broad pattern of life on Earth will prevail tomorrow as well as today, even though the detailed
ecological pattern within those biomes will change.
“Trends that can be happen”

• The first is the Population Growth. I have already mentioned the dramatic increase
in the world’s population from around 1 billion people in 1800, to 2 billion in 1900,
to over 5.2 billion today. Although the rate of population growth has slowed
somewhat from a peak of nearly 2% per year in 1970 to around 1.66% now, a
cautious medium projection suggest that by 2030 there will be more than 8 billion
people in the world that our descendants will be lucky if any, by 2070, stability has
been achieved at around 10 billion. The trend is unstoppable because in many
countries half the population is still under reproductive age.
• On the other hand, malnutrition will limit population growth in areas where water
supplies are inadequate, the soil is over exploited, and are no new reserves of
fertile land. Agricultural science, along with medicine, has been a major supporter
of population growth. But in large areas of Africa and India, per capital food
production has been declining recently even though total food production has
been increasing. Countries with high population growth, limited rainfall, and a hot
climate will be at risk until population increased is curbed by measures more
humane than famine. As an increasing number of people come up against
environmental limits, real threats to the peace and stability of nations may arise.
• The second trend is deforestation, which, I suggest, is also unstoppable because of
the need to feed more people, especially in the developing world.

Deforestation
• Another trend that is unstoppable is desertification or land degradation.

Land Degradation
• Fourth, I believe that the continuing loss of the planet’s biological diversity is
unavoidable. We are, however, almost bound to lose a significant number of
species from the earth as a consequence of the development process impelled by
imperative of human need.
Species in Biodiversity
But we must not overself the disaster. The losses matter if you believe that species
other than our own have a right to exist as a part of natural creation. They matter if
you believe that the rich diversity of life maintains the equilibrium of Gala, the planet,
in ways we do not fully understand and that reducing diversity brings risks we do not
comprehend. The losses also matter because there maybe many species and
genotypes in the wild that are or could be off considerable value to humanity and that
will act as the genetic basis for evolution in response to future change.
Genetic Evolution
The End

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