Over 25 years ago a prominent doctor of the U.S. Public Health Service observed: “We all live under the haunting fear that something may corrupt the environment to the point where man joins the dinosaurs as an obsolete form of life.”

In the intervening years, that fear has intensified. Last year a national forum, addressed by nearly a hundred biologists, warned that coming was a wave of mass extinctions such as wiped out the dinosaurs, only this time it would not be by a natural development but “by human activities.”

This year Worldwatch Institute released its report State of the World 1987. It said: “A sustainable society satisfies its needs without diminishing the prospects of the next generation. By many measures, contemporary society fails to meet this criterion. Questions of ecological sustainability are arising on every continent. The scale of human activities has begun to threaten the habitability of the earth itself.”

The Institute’s report said that the demands of over 5 billion people​—and their numbers are increasing by 83 million a year—​are overwhelming the regenerative capacities of earth’s biological systems.

Chemical pollution is thinning the atmospheric ozone and may lead to “causing more skin cancers, impairing human immune systems, and retarding crop growth.”

If acid rain continues, not only will more lakes and forests die but soils will acidify further and “may take decades, if not centuries, to recover.”

Intensified farming practices “have pushed the rate of topsoil loss beyond that of new soil formation.”

Deforestation reduces the amount of carbon dioxide used from the atmosphere, and the burning of fossil fuels releases more carbon dioxide than the remaining plants and the oceans can take in. The result is an increase in the warming greenhouse effect that may ultimately melt glaciers and flood coastal cities.

The loss of tropical forests means less recycling of water for rainfall and may lead to the creation of deserts.

Toxic chemicals, raw sewage, crude oil, nuclear accidents, radon, microwaves, asbestos​—on and on could go the listing of man’s sins against the environment.

State of the World 1987 warns: “Never have so many systems vital to the earth’s habitability been out of equilibrium simultaneously. New environmental problems also span time periods and geographic areas that stretch beyond the authority of existing political and social institutions. No single nation can stabilize the earth’s climate, protect the ozone layer, preserve the planet’s mantle of forests and soils, or reverse the acidification of lakes and streams. Only a sustained international commitment will suffice.”

This commitment is dragging its feet, and time is running out. Hundreds of billions are spent in the arms race; a mere pittance is spent on preserving the environment that sustains us and the neglect of which can kill us. Since 1983 the United States alone has committed $9 billion to the Strategic Defense Initiative research and wants $33 billion more for it from 1986 to 1991​—but turns stingy on the environment. The other industrialized nations do likewise. The State of the World 1987 puts the crisis in a nutshell: “The time has come to make peace with each other so that we can make peace with the earth.”

“A sustainable future,” this report states, “calls upon us simultaneously to arrest the carbon dioxide buildup, protect the ozone layer, restore forests and soils, stop population growth, boost energy efficiency, and develop renewable energy sources. No generation has ever faced such a complex set of issues requiring immediate attention. Preceding generations have always been concerned about the future, but we are the first to be faced with decisions that will determine whether the earth our children inherit will be habitable.”

The following article shows the crisis developing over toxic chemicals.

The Ugly Side of Industrial Chemicals

IT WAS just after midnight on a cool December evening in 1984 that the worst industrial accident in history happened. A world away from the Republic of India, few people were familiar with the name Bhopal, an industrial city with a population of more than 800,000, located almost at the center of the country. Its sleeping residents were unaware of the death-dealing events developing a stone’s throw away.

At the U.S. Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, a storage tank holding 45 tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC), a deadly chemical used in making pesticides, began building up dangerously high pressure. Suddenly, from a malfunctioning valve, a cloud of poisonous gas began spreading death and agony over the quiet city. It snuffed out the lives of more than 2,500 men, women, and children. It maimed more than a hundred thousand others.

The death of thousands of animals​—water buffalo, cattle, and dogs—​caused the countryside to be littered with dead bodies that clogged the roads and city streets. Bhopal became a giant makeshift crematory, burning the dead around the clock. Seventy funeral pyres, with bodies stacked 25 high, consumed the dead in their flames. Others were buried in hurriedly dug mass graves​—scores of bodies at a time.

Later another catastrophe hit Europe and was called “Bhopal on the Rhine.” A chemical spill from an industrial plant above Basel, Switzerland, dumped 40 tons of poisonous waste into the Rhine. It killed hundreds of thousands of fish and eels as it “drifted downstream along the German-French border, into the Rhineland and then through the Netherlands to the North Sea.” One newspaper editorialized: “The Swiss used to be considered clean, their industry safe, and that included the chemical industry. That is all past now.”

The residents of Bhopal and communities along the Rhine River had become the victims of a technological age that boasts the compounding of more than 66,000 chemical concoctions. Many are formulated to make life easier for man, yet, ironically, a vast number are highly toxic and can cause fatal and devastating side effects, both to humans and to the entire biological system. One expert classified these chemicals as “biocides.”

Many are the chemicals with long names that few people can pronounce and that for convenience bear letters such as PCB, DDT, PCDD, PCDF, TCDD. This alphabet soup of toxic chemicals is a deadly hazard both to humans and to earth’s resources on which man must rely to live. “Thousands upon thousands of releases of toxic substances into the environment” occur each year, said a spokesman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Such releases pose a threat to the quality of air, surface water, and underground drinking supplies, and poison the soil for decades to come.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in the United States alone, 1.5 trillion gallons of hazardous chemical wastes find their way into the underground water systems each year.a Knowing that just one gallon of solvent will contaminate 20 million gallons of groundwater to exceed safe levels, it is staggering to compute what catastrophic damage 1.5 trillion gallons of poisonous chemicals are doing.

Because of hazardous chemicals and wastes and the careless dumping of them, rivers and streams are being polluted. Fish are dying. As the rivers and streams enter the oceans, the death-dealing chemicals pour with them, and in some places where ocean life was once plentiful, today, according to famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, fish can no longer be found.

Bird and animal life is also threatened by the contamination. Even wildlife sanctuaries prove to be no haven. “Ten national wildlife refuges are contaminated by toxic chemicals and another 74 may be in danger. . . . Agricultural runoff containing selenium and other chemicals has killed large numbers of waterfowl in the refuge,” reported The New York Times of February 4, 1986.

World experts do not paint a promising picture for the future. The rapid diminishment of earth’s resources does not end with the loss of soil and the pollution of air and water. What about earth’s great tropical rain forests that for millenniums have raised their leafy arms hundreds of feet into the air? Are these too in danger of going the way of other resources that are diminishing before our eyes? Whether we realize it or not, our lives are affected by these luxuriant handiworks of Jehovah, as the next article will show.

An Earth Without Forests​—Is That What the Future Holds?

VAST areas that for millenniums were covered with luxuriant tropical rain forests are today becoming barren. Once the habitat of exotic birds and animal life that took refuge under the prolific umbrella of millions of species of plants and trees, some towering 200 feet into the sky, these beautiful, green, pulsating places of the earth are rapidly becoming wastelands.a

With destructive efficiency man is ravaging the mountains with the ax, the saw, the bulldozer, and the match. He is reducing them to denuded, scarred, scorched lands of abandoned wildernesses. This inexorable destruction of earth’s tropical forests is being waged at the shocking rate of 50 acres per minute, or over 100,000 square kilometers a year​—an area equal the size of Austria.b

By the year 2000, according to some experts, about 12 percent of the tropical rain forest that remained in 1980 will be gone​—no small accomplishment for man, even with his reputation for destruction. Gone, too, will be the exotic birds, the animal wildlife, and the varieties of plant life that cannot be found in any other climatic areas of the earth. Man is destroying a part of the very intricate ecosystem so vital to his life and which provides him with incalculable benefits.

More than half the medicines man uses come from plants, a great many from tropical plants. What would industry do without the source of rubber, turpentine, rattan, bamboo​—all indigenous to the tropical forest—​plus a galaxy of fibers, resins, dyes, and spices? Blindly and indiscriminately, man is destroying a treasure of immense value.

From these great forests, vast amounts of life-giving oxygen are produced. Some scientists warn that this massive reduction of oxygen-producing forests may well intensify the feared greenhouse effect, causing sea levels to rise to catastrophic heights.

Deforestation has already had a severe and immediate impact on much of the world. Nations such as Brazil, Indonesia, and the Philippines have seen the rapid conversion of their lands from dense jungle to virtually barren wastelands. “In Southeast Asia as many as 25 million acres of once-forested land now bear only tenacious and useless sawgrasses that provide neither food, fuel, nor forage,” reports the World Resources Institute.

The felling and selling of tremendous tracts of trees guarantees the deforestation of Fiji within 20 years, of Thailand by the turn of the century, and of the lowland rain forest of the Philippines by 1990, Science Digest reports. In Australia the devastation of its forests is widespread​—two thirds of its rain forests entirely gone! India is losing 3.2 million acres of forests yearly to the ax.

“As of the mid-1980s,” reports the magazine Natural History of April 1986, “every country in Africa is losing tree cover. Indeed, forest deficits are now the rule throughout the Third World.” In 63 countries 1.5 billion people are cutting wood faster than it can grow back, creating a deficit that can only lead to forest and fuelwood bankruptcy. Experts expect the deficit to double by the year 2000.

Forest destruction touches at the very heart of man’s ability to exist​—agriculture. To begin with, when man fells the trees on mountains and hills to plant his seed, without vegetation to hold the soil in place, the soil is quickly washed away. Also, in countries where fuelwood is scarce, “an estimated 400 million tons of dung are burned annually . . . This burning of a potential fertilizer is estimated to depress grain harvests by over 14 million tons.”

Are the great forests of the earth really doomed by irreversible forces? Or will this generation leave much of earth’s resources and beauty for its children? It talks lots, writes reams, but does little. So, what future will it leave its children? Time will tell, and little time is left.

What Future for Us and Our Children?

A FAMILY cannot spend more than it makes and remain solvent. A nation cannot pay out more than it takes in and still prosper; nor can we continue our deficit spending of the environment. We cannot squander more soil than is formed, create more carbon dioxide than plants can use, cut down more trees than we replace, pollute more air and water than earth can recycle. Environmental deficits, like national deficits, will demand an accounting. They will be paid, either in money and international cooperation or in lives​—ours and our children’s.

Modern technology has made the ruining of the earth possible. It could be used to prevent it. Why isn’t it? Love of money. It would cost billions. This world cannot see​—or in its selfishness will not see—​beyond its own shortsighted materialistic desires. Since it refuses to pay in money, it will pay in loss of topsoil, loss of forests, loss of aquifers, hothouse atmosphere, poisoned water, mounting sickness, human lives. And to hold onto its money, this world is selling off its children’s future.

Will it wake up in time? History’s answer is not reassuring, but God’s answer is. Jehovah God himself says that he will step in and “bring to ruin those ruining the earth.” (Revelation 11:18) He will remove from earth those ruining its environment and destroying its beauty, for he created it to be life-sustaining and beautiful. “The heavens are my throne, and the earth is my footstool,” he says, and: “I shall glorify the very place of my feet.”​—Isaiah 66:1; 60:13.