The Delicate Balance, Part 1: Exponential Population Growth
It took thousands of years for mankind to evolve from nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmers settled in towns and villages. It took only centuries from that point until Thomas Malthus postulated, in the 18th century, that h..
The Delicate Balance, Part 1: John Muir
One of the first voices in the environmental consciousness movement was John Muir, who lobbied for preservation and the creation of the National Park System. He also founded the Sierra Club in 1892.
The Delicate Balance, Part 1: Reason for Optimism
Ecological refugees-people whose environment is so degraded that it no longer supports the social fabric of the country are a growing concern in every industrialized country. Many other population issues exist, but chang..
The Delicate Balance, Part 1: Technology is Not Always the Answer
The Biosphere 2 experiment attempted to create a human engineered self sustaining environmental system. The experiment served to illustrate how little is understood about the workings of our natural ecosystems services.
The Delicate Balance, Part 1: The Cost of Science, Technology, and Population Growth
The impact of modern science and technology on the biosphere is profound. The earth's natural ecosystems have the ability to cleanse the water; recycle wastes, turning them back into nutrients; pollinate crops; generate ..
The Delicate Balance, Part 1: The Human Imprint
The last half century or so has seen the impact of human enterprise on the environment escalate beyond the collective impact of humans over the previous four billion years. Human endeavors have changed the composition o..
The Delicate Balance, Part 2: Climate Destabilization
Global climate change is believed to be created by excessive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. While El Niño is not a reflection of climate change, it does demonstrate the results of unpredictable or unstabl..
The Delicate Balance, Part 2: Enduring Effect of Contaminates
Despite the fact that much clean-up has been done since the 1960s, the Great Lakes still contain fish that don't reach sexual maturity because of endocrine disrupting chemicals. A study of children whose mothers had eate..
The Delicate Balance, Part 2: Impact of Chemical Contamination
One of the difficulties of predicting potential dangers to the environment is that implications to future generations are often not foreseen. Rachel Carson galvanized public and political action to prevent indiscriminate..
The Delicate Balance, Part 2: Less is More
The same kind of technology that created most of today's environmental problems is equally capable of finding ways to correct them and, more importantly, mitigate the damage that current processes generate. The problem i..