CIAO DATE: 07/03

The State of the Natural World

Introduction

The sad truth is that the natural world is everywhere disappearing before our eyes. More than 6 billion people fill the world, with a predicted 9 billion in the decades ahead. We are simply too many—the large numbers of poor struggling to raise the quality of their lives in any way they can and the fewer affluent who nonetheless consume so much of nature's bounty.

The litany is familiar to us all. Half the great tropical forests have been cleared—among the last global frontiers. Species of plants and animals are disappearing a hundred times or more faster than before the coming of humanity. We have driven atmospheric carbon dioxide to the highest levels in at least 200,000 years and contributed to a global warming that will ultimately be bad news everywhere. Forests, freshwater, and marine systems alike are suffering.

The world's forests reached their maximum extent six to eight thousand years ago, at the dawn of agriculture and retreat of the continental glaciers. Today, with the spread of agriculture, only about half of that forest cover remains, and it is being cut at an accelerating rate. Over 60 percent of temperate hardwood and mixed forest has been lost, 30 percent of coniferous forest, 45 percent of tropical rainforest, and 75 percent of tropical dry forest. And half of the surviving forest has been degraded, much of it severely.

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