ON A cliff overlooking the ocean, you’ve built a beautiful house on 20 acres of gently rolling woodland. The inside of the house has been flawlessly decorated by a talented artist. Outside, near the house, landscaped flower beds give dazzling color, as also do the window boxes on the house itself. Fruit orchards and vegetable gardens provide ample food.

Beyond these cultivated areas, towering trees surround a meadow through which a brook gurgles and winds its way. Sea breezes sway the wild flowers that add splashes of color to sunny glades. Everywhere you look is a feast for the eyes, and for your nostrils as they draw in deep breaths of sea air scented by flowers, and for your ears as birds fill the air with song and the wind adds its rustling of leaves. And in the background you hear the subdued sounds of the ocean surf as it rolls in on the beach far below.

You survey the results of your work and feel satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment. You want others to enjoy it. You bring in a large family and turn all of it over to them, along with instructions for its care. You leave.

Later you return, and you’re shocked! The ocean is a yellowish brown, globs of oil and garbage litter the beach, the trees have been chopped down, the meadow has turned brown, the brook is a mere trickle and it’s polluted. Trash is everywhere. The birds have left, the flowers are gone, the fruit trees are dead and concrete covers where the garden was.

The paint has peeled off the house. Inside the house the floors are filthy, the walls marked up, the furniture scratched. The kitchen is littered with leftover food and the sink is filled with dirty dishes. Blaring music comes from some rooms, cursing is heard in others, and in some gross sexual immoralities and perversions are being practiced. The family left in charge has greatly increased, and its members quarrel and fight and even kill one another.

As you survey the damage to your house and its grounds, and note the moral decay of its inhabitants, what thoughts go through your mind? This was the work of your hands. You’re the landlord. These people are your tenants. Obviously, they don’t appreciate what you did for them. They have ignored your instructions as to the care of your property. Will you leave them there? What will you do?

Similarly, “to Jehovah belong the earth and that which fills it.” (Ps. 24:1) After he created it he “saw everything he had made and, look! it was very good.” (Gen. 1:31) He put people on the earth and told them to take care of it​—the plants, the animals, the environment. Now, after 6,000 years, what does he see? How does he feel about what he sees? What will he do?

What Earth’s Tenants Have Done

“We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it, chopped down its forests, leveled its hills, muddied its waters, and dirtied its air. That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been evicted long ago.”​—Rose Bird, chief justice of the California Supreme Court.

Recent Headlines Pile Up the Evidence

A FLOOD OF HOT WASTE

“An ominous question: how to dispose of the rising flood of radioactive waste? . . . buried wastes will remain radioactive for thousands of years,” some “for a quarter of a million years.”

TOXIC WASTES ARE DAMAGING AMERICANS’ HEALTH

“More ‘Love Canals’ to come in an American future increasingly clouded by chemicals dangerous to public health.”

SOVIET CONSERVATION: A BEAR WITH NO CLAWS

“Nearly 10 per cent of the habitable territory of the Soviet Union has already been laid waste by environmental pollution.”

POLLUTION ENVELOPS MADRID

“In a single week, 700 persons with respiratory or cardiovascular ailments are believed to have died from the effects of the oppressive smog.”

POLLUTION STALKS THE MEDITERRANEAN

“The Mediterranean, in fact, is well on the way to becoming a vast open sewer.

DEFORESTATION AND DISASTER [IN BRAZIL]

“Many once plentiful plants and birds are gone, and human beings who live there are disfigured by skin cancer.”

GROWING DESERTS A THREAT TO MILLIONS

“Deserts are creeping outward in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas because of unsound use of land.”

NORWAY’S KILLER [ACID] RAIN

“The acid originates all over Europe, from as far west as Belfast and as far east as Moscow.”

TOXIC SMOKE CHOKES MEXICO CITY

“A recent report on Mexico’s air pollution said it was ‘an indirect cause in the death of 150,000 children each year’ and ‘seriously affects 175,000 adults each year.”’

DIOXIN TURNS UP IN THE GREAT LAKES

“A series of reports in Canada and in the United States is establishing the Great Lakes Basin as the most heavily polluted area in the Western world.”

FREE USE OF PESTICIDES IN GUATEMALA TAKES A DEADLY TOLL

During the 90-day cotton-growing period “we treat 30 or 40 people a day for pesticide poisoning.”

KARACHI FACES WATER POLLUTION CRISIS

“Drinking water in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and main port, is heavily polluted by untreated sewage and industrial waste.”

MORE EVIDENCE OF THE DANGERS OF LEAD POLLUTION

“Lead is responsible for subtle damage to children’s brains.”

SUPERBUGS

“Insects once decimated by pesticides have developed immunities enabling them to multiply at a fantastic pace.”

SPERM FOUND ESPECIALLY VULNERABLE TO ENVIRONMENT

“Miscarriages, defects, infertility linked to damage by toxins.”

USE OF FOSSIL FUEL CALLED THREAT TO WORLD CLIMATE

“A carbon dioxide buildup over the next 200 years could lead to dramatic changes in the earth’s climate, . . . the floating Arctic ice pack would melt.”

NO OFFSHORE OIL SPILL HAS EVER BEEN CLEANED UP TO ANY SIGNIFICANT EXTENT

“Marine organisms . . . accumulate oil hydrocarbons in their tissues. These fish and shellfish pose a public health hazard because some of these hydrocarbons are carcinogenic.”

EXPOSURE TO NOISE FOUND TO POSE NEW HEALTH RISKS

“Linked not only to loss of hearing, but also to high blood pressure, nervous disorders, learning problems, insomnia, underweight newborn babies and perhaps even some forms of heart disease.”

POLLUTION OF OCEANS IS ENORMOUS THREAT

“But few people care; ‘business as usual,’ pending annihilation.”

REPORT URGES GLOBAL ACTION ON RESOURCES

“Time is running out for international action to prevent a starving, overcrowded, polluted, resource-poor world.”

Earth’s Tenants Make Bad Matters Worse

Their remedies not only boomerang; they also set in motion calamitous chain reactions that claim millions of victims

RACHEL CARSON’S deeply moving book Silent Spring marked a turning point in worldwide concern for the environment. It was her book that first aroused the world to the danger of pesticides. But the world in general gave no heed, and that bad matter continues to worsen.

Insect pests destroy crops. To kill the pests, farmers spray with pesticides. Bugs die by the millions, but a few possess a natural immunity and survive. They pass on this immunity to their offspring, and soon a race of superbugs is eating the crops. The remedy has boomeranged. A bad matter has been made worse.

But it has done more than boomerang. It has touched off a series of chain reactions creating new calamities and new victims. The pesticides kill valuable insects that preyed on the pests, rain washes the poisons into the ground where they damage soil bacteria, water carries them to lakes and oceans where microorganisms and plankton are destroyed and fish are contaminated. Birds of prey eat the fish and can hatch no eggs. People eat the fish and the pesticides. Or the poisons enter people through another food chain​—the pesticides land on grass, cattle eat the grass, the poisons enter their milk and meat, which people drink or eat.

Pesticides are but a small part of the pollution problem. Newspaper headlines alone reveal pollution’s worldwide scope. It is not the purpose here to review what has already been widely publicized. There is a growing awareness on the part of some, however, of major crises that loom ahead, namely: The loss of topsoil. The loss of plant and animal species. The loss of caring about others. Please consider these, briefly.

Topsoil is being lost earth wide, but concentrate on the United States, which has been called “the breadbasket for the world’s hungry multitudes.” Three million acres of farmland each year are being paved over, subdivided or industrialized. Four million acres are lost annually through erosion. In Illinois 181 million tons are lost yearly​—two bushels of dirt for every bushel of corn produced. A century ago Iowa averaged 16 inches of topsoil; now it approaches 8 inches. Every second 15 tons of topsoil flow out of the mouth of the Mississippi River. “The best topsoil of Iowa,” farmers say, “can be found in the Gulf of Mexico.”

And the topsoil that is retained is being damaged. Healthy soil teems with life​—algae, worms, insects, bacteria, fungi, molds, yeasts, protozoa and other minute organisms. It is this vast community of living organisms​—five billion to a teaspoonful of temperate-zone soil, according to some estimates—​that causes organic matter to decay, becoming humus. Humus is vital. It is nourishment for plants and prevents erosion.

One authority said: “Soil losses increased 22% in the early 1970s with [the beginnings] of intensive farming.” Commercial fertilizers do not replace humus. When ammonium sulfate is used the sulfate becomes sulphuric acid, which kills the soil organisms that make humus. Pesticides also take their toll on soil life. Deep plowing buries the soil organisms inches below their natural habitat​—the upper three inches of soil. It also exposes the loosened dirt to eroding winds and waters. Nitrate fertilizers are not all used by the plants​—up to half of it is leached out into water supplies that end up in lakes. There it produces excessive algae growth, and when the algae die and decay, the oxygen in the water is depleted and the fish die. In this way dead lakes are created.

The consequences of soil abuse are far-reaching. Even more far-reaching, however, is the loss of plant and animal genetic material.

The highly productive food-crop strains developed over the last 20 years are from varieties that grew wild for thousands of years. The wild plants had a natural resistance to disease and pests, but man’s new hybrid plants, intensively farmed on damaged soil, have to get their protection from herbicides and insecticides. In many cases, the wild strains that were used to breed the new hybrids in the first place have themselves become extinct, taking with them perhaps the most precious substances on earth, their germ plasm. Without a large pool of this genetic material from wild plants, man will not have the raw materials to develop new hybrids to meet the new challenges posed by superbugs, plant diseases, weather and increasing populations.

Over 95 percent of human nutrition comes from 30 plant crops and seven kinds of animals. There is a danger in depending on so few food sources, especially in view of the intensive farming and the inbreeding that weaken resistance to pests, disease and climatic changes. An example of the value of wild species is the mustard plant. From it were developed broccoli, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, cabbage and cauliflower. Also, from a relative of corn, a wild perennial, there is hope of developing a high-yielding corn species that would be a perennial, not needing to be regrown each year from seed.

Once a plant or animal species becomes extinct, its gene pool is lost forever. And that is what’s happening earth wide. More than 200 species of animals have become extinct within the last three or four centuries. More than 800 are currently in jeopardy. The greatest threat to both animals and plants is the loss of habitats.

Every year some 27 million acres of tropical forest are lost. In the world’s temperate zones there are 1.5 million kinds of organisms; tropical forests contain 3 million. They can make big contributions to the development of new medicines and new food sources. But the forests are disappearing, and along with them their gene pools. We may never know whether there was an obscure plant in the Philippines that could cure cancer or an unknown fungus in the Amazon that could prevent heart attacks. Aside from nuclear war, it may be the worst crisis of man’s making.

More than this: When tropical forests are cleared, rains erode the soil, which is poor anyway and won’t grow crops or support cattle for more than a few years. Then farmers and cattlemen move on and repeat the cycle of destruction. The prognosis is that what was the Amazon jungle will become the Amazon desert. And still more: When forests are burned, great quantities of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. This adds to the vast amounts already being spewed into it by industry. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, carbon dioxide in the air has increased from 15 to 25 percent. This growing blanket of carbon dioxide could change the climate and imperil food production and our survival.

Last year environmentalist Norman Meyers said to a global conference: “Of earth’s five million species, we could well lose at least one million by the end of the century. We are already losing one species per day, and by the end of the 1980s we could be losing one species per hour. . . . Species and tropical forests are the great sleeper issues of the late twentieth century. It is difficult to imagine two issues of greater potential significance to humankind, yet less recognized by the general public and its political leaders.”

Whether the world’s politicians recognize this or not, they have other priorities. President Reagan reportedly has called environmental regulations an albatross around the neck of American industry. His overall aim is less regulation, less enforcement, lower standards and reduced penalties. The secretary of the interior, James Watt, has set about scuttling the environmental protections for plants, animals, air, water and soil​—and for people. Other countries are also reshuffling their priorities to put the economy ahead of the environment.

Yet, in its annual “State of the World Environment Report,” the United Nations Environment Programme claimed that pollution damage in developed countries costs more than environmental protection. The report also pinpointed a trend​—the relocation of polluting industries from developed to developing countries. It says the Japanese do this. Also American industries hazardous to the environment are being relocated in Mexico, Brazil and other developing countries.

Does this not reflect a calloused indifference to the welfare of people? A loss of caring about others? No love for neighbor, just love of money? A case of profits before people? Illustrating this disregard for others is Cubatão, Brazil. Foreign industry has so polluted the city that its four rivers are dead. Fish taken from the nearby ocean outlet are blind or deformed from ingested mercury. There are no birds, no butterflies, no insects of any kind, and when it rains it’s acid rain. Many babies are born deformed or dead, many others perish within a week. Since such flagrant pollution is not allowed in developed nations, the managing director of one of Cubatão’s steel companies very callously said that “the iron foundry is an activity more suitable to third world countries.”

We need a return to old values. Love of neighbor is the only practical course. Care for the environment is for our survival. Too often, before the danger is seen the damage is done. And even after the danger is seen, the damage continues to be done. The web of life is closely woven. Endanger a few and you endanger many. At first it’s a few butterflies, then it’s us. All are involved eventually.

“Is it really necessary,” asks Romain Gary, “to keep on saying that no man is an island? How many warnings do we need? How many proofs and statistics, how many deaths, how much beauty gone, how many ‘last specimens’ in those sad zoos? . . . The heart either speaks or it does not. . . . It is absurd to cram our museums with art and to spend billions for beauty and then to let beauty be destroyed wantonly in all its living splendor.”​—From the introduction to the book Vanishing Species.

The all-important question is, however, What will earth’s Owner do about the polluting of his earth?

[Blurb on page 6]

“The best topsoil of Iowa can be found in the Gulf of Mexico”

[Blurb on page 8]

“How many deaths, how much beauty gone, how many ‘last specimens’ in those sad zoos?”

[Blurb on page 9]

Every year some 27 million acres of tropical forest are lost

What Earth’s Owner Will Do

Put yourself in his place and ask yourself, What would I do?

THE first article in this issue tells of a beautiful home you’ve provided for tenants who proceeded to ruin it. Undoubtedly, you would evict them. Succeeding articles show just some of the ruin people have brought upon the earth. Which is worse, for a family to wreck your house or for humankind to ruin the earth? If you would not tolerate tenants who wreck your house, can you not understand why God would not allow those who ruin his earth to remain on it?

This is exactly what Jehovah has said, that he will not allow this ruining of his earth to continue indefinitely. Moreover, he has set the time for halting it, a time known as “the last days.” Wars, famines, earthquakes, diseases, moral breakdown, juvenile delinquency, burgeoning crime, a me-first pleasure-oriented society with no time for God or godliness​—these were the features that were foretold to characterize the “last days” of this present system. The overall effect of all of this is exactly what was foretold for it and which we now see​—“anguish of nations, not knowing the way out,” and peoples everywhere “faint out of fear and expectation of the things coming upon the inhabited earth.”​—2 Tim. 3:1-5; Matt. 24:3-14; Luke 21:25-27.

Do some scoff at this? Their presence was also predicted for this time: “You know this first, that in the last days there will come ridiculers with their ridicule, proceeding according to their own desires and saying: ‘Where is this promised presence of his? Why, from the day our forefathers fell asleep in death, all things are continuing exactly as from creation’s beginning.”’ (2 Pet. 3:3, 4) The scoffers are present, as foretold, and they do delight to say that all these things have happened before.

But this is not so, not to the degree that they now exist earth wide, and something more has been added which has never been before. John Oakes, former senior editor of the New York Times, identified this new addition: “The environmental crisis . . . is different in quality and degree from anything that has gone before in the history of the human race.” Jehovah God declared this additional thing as another one of the evidences of the “last days.” After mentioning Christ’s enthronement and the international turmoil, the Bible book of Revelation states that the time has also arrived “to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.” (Rev. 11:18) Men may have been willing to ruin it before, in their greed and love of money, but they did not have the power to do so. Now, however, their scientific technology has given them the power to ruin the earth and they are doing so as they greedily exploit it. And, as the prophecy also shows, it is Jehovah who will stop their destructive course.

Jehovah God did not create the earth on a whim of the moment. He did not make it to allow it to be turned into a wasteland. He acted with a purpose in view. “God, the Former of the earth and the Maker of it, . . . did not create it simply for nothing, [but] formed it even to be inhabited.” And it is to endure forever in an inhabited and beautiful paradise condition.​—Isa. 45:18; Ps. 104:5; Eccl. 1:4.

The first man on earth was placed in the garden of Eden and told “to cultivate it and to take care of it.” Plants were to be food for all living creatures, not just man. Some plants were for beauty​—how gloriously he clothed the lilies of the field! The land was to be cared for. Later, God decreed that every seventh year was to be “a sabbath of complete rest for the land.”​—Gen. 1:30; 2:15-17; Matt. 6:28-30; Lev. 25:3-7.

Have people thus cared for the earth as commanded?

Regard for animals was to be shown. God calls righteous the man who cares for animals, but brands as wicked those who are cruel. His law given through Moses provided for the preservation of species​—mother birds were to be spared. One was not to plow with an ox and an ass yoked together​—it’s unfair to the smaller, weaker animal. One was not to muzzle the ox that treads out the grain​—it has the right to eat while it works. Under that Law, domestic animals were to rest, along with their masters on the Sabbath, and men were to work to aid an animal in distress, even if this was on a Sabbath day.​—Matt. 10:29; Prov. 12:10; Deut. 22:6, 7, 10; 25:4; Ex. 23:12, 5; Luke 14:5.

Are those principles followed today?

God gave instructions as to how people should treat one another. Jesus expressed it this way: “All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must likewise do to them.” “You must love your neighbor as yourself.” And just as we would like to see appreciation on the part of tenants living in our beautiful home, so we should show gratitude to the Owner of the earth, Jehovah God. “You must love Jehovah your God with your whole heart,” Jesus said. (Matt. 7:12; 22:37-39) Interestingly, to do this you must also love your neighbor, “for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot be loving God, whom he has not seen.”​—1 John 4:20.

Do we see this kind of love guiding man’s current pollution of earth’s air, water and soil? And do we see it in the calloused and indifferent and even cruel destruction that he is wreaking today upon plants and animals and peoples? And, especially, do we see it on the part of industrialists who move their operations to vulnerable third world developing nations where they can flagrantly pollute, maim and kill without any troublesome environmental regulations to curtail their rape of those lands and their defenseless people?

Finally, there is another kind of pollution that ruins the earth​—moral pollution. It also calls for the ousting of earth’s tenants. When God told the Israelites to take over the Promised Land of Canaan, he was not callously removing one people to make room for another. The Canaanites were being thrown out because they had polluted the land by their gross immorality and religious bloodshedding. After listing some of these heinous crimes, God warned Israel: “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, because by all these things the nations whom I am sending out from before you have made themselves unclean. Consequently the land is unclean, and I shall bring punishment for its error upon it, and the land will vomit its inhabitants out.”​—Lev. 18:24, 25.

But Israel did as those nations had done: served idols, spilled innocent blood, practiced despicable immoralities, until once again “the land came to be polluted.” And because God is impartial, Israel was vomited out of the land just as were the Canaanites before them. “Look!” said the prophet, “Jehovah is emptying the land and laying it waste, and he has twisted the face of it and scattered its inhabitants. And the very land has been polluted under its inhabitants, for they have bypassed the laws, changed the regulation, broken the indefinitely lasting covenant. That is why the curse itself has eaten up the land, and those inhabiting it are held guilty.”​—Ps. 106:35-39; Isa. 24:1, 5, 6.

Just as you would not let tenants remain in your lovely home if they ruined its beauty and turned its rooms into brothels, so Jehovah will oust earth’s tenants who pollute it. Thereafter it will become a beautiful paradise home for all mankind who will appreciate it and care for it. “Just a little while longer,” sings the psalmist, “and the wicked one will be no more; and you will certainly give attention to his place, and he will not be. But the meek ones themselves will possess the earth, and they will indeed find their exquisite delight in the abundance of peace. The righteous themselves will possess the earth, and they will reside forever upon it.”​—Ps. 37:10, 11, 29.

The earth is for all living creatures; all creation is to praise their Creator God, Jehovah. ‘Praise him, heavens, earth, sea creatures, birds, animals and all peoples,’ says Psalm 148. And the last verse of the last Psalm in the Bible sounds the glorious finale: “Every breathing thing​—let it praise Jah. Praise Jah, you people!”​—Ps. 150:6.

[Blurb on page 10]

‘The environmental crisis is different from anything that has gone before in the history of the human race’

[Blurb on page 11]

There is another kind of pollution that ruins the earth​—moral pollution

[Blurb on page 11]

“Look!” said the prophet, “Jehovah is emptying the land and laying it waste . . . the very land has been polluted under its inhabitants”

[Blurb on page 12]

The earth is for all living creatures; all creation is to praise Jehovah!

[Picture on page 12]

“It’s my world too”