THOMAS E. LOVEJOY, PH.D.
President of H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and The Environment

The ocean's food chain is at risk
We were one of the first to call attention to the acidification of the oceans. The oceans take up a huge amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. A portion of that carbon gets turned into carbonic acid, so that the more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the more acidic the oceans become. The oceans are now 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution. It's the most chilling change I've seen in my professional career. If it continues, tiny organisms at the base of the food chain will have their shells dissolve while the animals are still alive. It will

Published on Tuesday, July 8, 2008 by The Guardian/UK

Europe is propping up an unsustainable industry in an extreme example of short-termism that our children will pay for
by George Monbiot

All over the world, protesters are engaged in a heroic battle with reality. They block roads, picket fuel depots, throw missiles and turn over cars in an effort to hold it at bay. The oil is running out and governments, they insist, must do something about it. When they've sorted it out, what about the fact that the days are getting shorter? What do we pay our taxes for?

The latest people to join these surreal protests are the world's fishermen. They are on strike in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Japan, and demonstrating in scores of maritime

Technology provides us with some answers to the environmental challenges we are facing. Hybrid technologies have recently made it to the auto market, promising more fuel efficient transportation and less greenhouse emissions. Hydrogen fuels are a very promising alternative to the dirty energies we are using today. Ultra-clean and unlimited, it is the fuel of the future.

Renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics, wind and thermal energies and future renewables we can't imagine yet, promise to someday replace the dirty energy coal burning power plants used throughout the world today, maybe sooner than later for the residential communities.

Although technological advancement does have promises, it does not and will not get us out of

Sustainability? I don't believe there is such a thing anymore. If we were to sustain our current rates of consumption, habitat destruction, emissions, etc. the Earth's biosphere will collapse within a century.

The concept of sustainability at this point is flawed. It is now not a matter of "sustainability", it is a matter of retreat. We need to drastically reduce consumption, drastically reduce emissions, halt all critical habitat destruction, reduce an exponentially growing human population, end industrial pollution, end the expense of war in both monetarily and human life, and educate the world.

We need to rebuild a vast network of environmental habitats linked continuously throughout continents. We need to dive headlong into clean

"Given that we sit atop the food chain, nothing preys on us so there's nothing to stop our growth."

This is simply a major fallacy of our very ecologically fallacious culture. There is NO ‘top' to the food chain!

In fact, evolutionary tendency is from carnivorous to omnivorous where we see some plant eating capabilities, to exclusive plant eating capabilities and then further specialization (such as the bovine specialized stomach) adding an ability to digest much more commonly available foodstuffs, grasses.

If one looks with an accurate ecological lens, one sees that ecology itself moves towards dietary specializations that can support great herds, meaning larger and larger population numbers... and it turns out, these greater numbers are