By Richard W. Franke, Board Member, Sustainable Tompkins
Lester Brown’s recent (2011) book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, contains a number of unexpected “facts” (observations?). I selected a few of them: how many surprised you? Don’t believe him? You can download the entire book free here. Click here for his online documentation of everything he claims below.
- The actual cost of gasoline in the United States is $15 per gallon
- In 2009 the number of cars in the US declined for the first time in a century (except for WWII period when cars were not produced)
- China now has 459 “cancer villages”
- Between 1994 and 1999 China’s Gobi Desert grew by an area equal to half the state of Pennsylvania
- If the Greenland ice sheet melts entirely, sea level could rise 23 feet; if the West Antarctic Ice sheet breaks up, seal level would rise another 16 feet
- Of the one million Hurricane Katrina refugees from New Orleans, 300,000 did not return to their homes
- The summer 2010 heat wave in Russia was the most intense in 130 years of record keeping; the wheat harvest shrank from 100 million tons to 60 million tons
- 90% of the original forests of the Indus River Basin are gone
- Pakistan has 185 million people living on an area equal to 8% of the US land area
- From 1950 to the present, per person income worldwide increased 4 times while the world economy grew 10 times Read the rest of this entry »
