Crisis? What Crisis? Go back to sleep The Last Word | by editor Tim Miejan It's Monday, October 25 -- always my favorite day of the year [my birthday] and I cannot help thinking about a one-paragraph news item I clipped out of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press three days earlier. Located near the bottom of a column of nation and world briefs, the headline read: "Humans depleting Earth, group says." I did a double take on that one. The report, issued by the World Wildlife Fund out of Geneva, told us [in case you missed it] that "humanity's reliance on fossil fuels, the spread of cities, the destruction of natural habitats for farmland and exploitation of the oceans are destroying Earth's ability to sustain life." Wow! My son used to spend hours playing SimCity™ and the headlines from the virtual city he was creating would inform him of the urgent needs of the community. "Housing shortage decried" a headline might read, so he would build more houses. The "Humans depleting Earth" headline reminds me of just that kind of warning. Only instead of a banner headline and indepth coverage, the article was given 11 lines. The article went on to say that humans are consuming 20 percent more natural resources than the Earth can produce. The Pioneer-Press included the first three paragraphs of the original story, not including such facts as the consumption of fossil fuels -- coal, gas and oil -- increased by almost 700 percent between 1961 and 2001. Populations of land, freshwater and marine species fell on average by 40 percent between 1970 and 2000. The report warns of humanity's growing collective footprint on the Earth -- space to absorb the waste from energy consuption, and cities, roads and other infrastructure to live and produce products -- but critics of what they call "environmental alarmism" say of such reports that it is more a question of whether a country like the United States is producing more wealth than it's consuming. Spin the facts however you want to. The end result is that we continue to bury our heads in the sand about what we -- 6.1 billion people and growing -- are doing to the Earth. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney for the National Resources Defence Council and author of the new book Crimes Against Nature, reports that one of every six women in America now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for "a grim inventory of diseases," including autism, blindness, mental retardation, and heart, liver and kidney disease." That mercury, he says, is coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that not only contributed $100 million to the Bush administration, but their lobbyists were allowed to assist in drafting revised regulatory measures that do not require them to clean up the problem. "This is an issue that affects hundreds of thousands of people, but you don't see it in the newspaper," Kennedy said recently on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher." "It should be the headline every single day." He blamed former President Ronald Reagan for abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1988 that obligated the media to advance the public interest and serve our democracy. However, the media is now so controlled by corporations that "news departments have become corporate profit centers and their only obligation now is to their corporate shareholders," he said. The way we enforce pollution laws and the way we clean up our environment is a crisis we cannot ignore. Unfortunately, as long as environmental concerns are tied to corporate responsibility and growth, the companies win. And we lose. Our health suffers and our grandchildren are left with a poisoned world. Tim Miejan is editor of Edge Life. Contact him at (651) 578-8969, toll-free 1 (888) 776-5687 or editor@edgelife.net Copyright © 2004 Tim Miejan, all rights reserved.ee 1 (888) 776-5687 or editor@edgelife.net Copyright © 2004 Tim Miejan, all rights reserved.