We are now mutilating the lungs of the earth using the technology that we developed in order to make our daily lives more pleasant and affluent. As our emission of carbons and other atmospheric poisons exceeds the ability of the diminishing forests to reprocess them, we create an unsustainable imbalance that leads swiftly down the road to our own extinction.
Four and a half billion years have passed since the earth was born; three and a half billion years since the predecessors of modern plants produced enough oxygen for the most primitive of aerobic cells to evolve. It took over a billion years for the oxygen that primitive plants produced to constitute 20 percent of the air, making animal life as we know it possible. In a matter of a few centuries, humans could reverse this process and make the atmosphere incapable of supporting healthy animal life.
Humans were among the latest life forms to evolve. This was only several million years ago, a mere instant in the long history of the earth. Within a single century, humans have not only prospered but also endangered their natural environment to a critical extent. If human patterns of reproduction, consumption, industrialization, and destruction continue unchecked, the future not only of humanity but of life as we know it on this planet has very few centuries left.
Ocean Pollution
The ocean is becoming a gigantic pool of waste water. The excretion and drainage of 5.6 billion people living on the earth, industrial wastes and synthetic byproducts pouring out of factories, agricultural chemicals sprayed over vast farmlands, chemicals used for raising fish along the coasts, industrial and nuclear waste dumped directly from ships—these all flow into the ocean, continually escalating its level of pollution beyond its ability to recycle.
The most dangerous among recognized ocean pollutants are industrial wastes containing synthetic chemicals, and the insecticides and agricultural chemicals permeating the soil and flowing into the ocean in underground water. The American forces introduced DDT to Japan after the war; this was especially deleterious to the balance of nature and has lasting side effects on humans and many other living creatures.
The process of larger animals eating smaller animals that eat vegetable matter or plankton is a hierarchical order of nature called the food chain. Through the food chain, DDT is progressively accumulated in the bodies of living creatures: minute traces of DDT in plankton are concentrated in sardines, and redoubled in the fish that eat sardines. Eagles, hawks, and other large birds of prey that live on fish are especially contaminated by the highly concentrated DDT, and their hormone systems are destroyed. As a result, the number of birds of prey has decreased dreadfully.
The human waste, gray water, and sewage dumped into the oceans raise the levels of ammonia and phosphorus in sea water. This in turn has killed off several species of plankton and the small fish feeding on them. In turn, the larger fish which feed on the smaller fish begin to decrease, and as a result the balance of the entire ocean food chain has been disturbed. If this trend continues it will not only affect the catch of fish for direct human use but also destroy the ecological balance of the entire ocean ecosystem.
Every living creature on earth lives within the balance of the food chain. When this balance is destroyed and the number of a certain species increases or decreases unusually, other species are inevitably affected, and life as a whole is disordered. This can lead to the extinction of entire species.
The earth maintains its organic order in this way. We humans owe the continuity of our lives to this order. Nature is great, and those who oppose or upset it will perish. The philosophical principle of respect for nature indeed has a scientific justification.
DDT is not the only poison polluting the oceans. Dioxins from bleaching, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from plastic production, trihalomethanes, thermonuclear waste, and oil spills from wars and accidents have all disastrously polluted the world's oceans.
As the water cycle circulates pollutants from the troposphere to the subsoil and ultimately the oceans, living creatures all over the world have been polluted, from the stratosphere to the depths of the sea—birds and fish, penguins and polar bears, marine mammals and humans. In time, no organism nor ecosystem can escape the effects of this cycle of pollution.
The Limits of Science
As scientific reports from around the world have started to show the calamitous conditions of the earth, people have begun to understand that the earth is not limitless. More and more people have begun to sense the danger that we will destroy the entire planetary ecosystem during the next century unless we do something now to save the air, oceans, forests, and earth itself.
If someone were attacked by a thug and lay injured on the ground, we would immediately give first aid. Before pursuing those who destroy the environment, we must do our best to heal the earth. But if the criminals continue to injure it or threaten us, we must first subdue them, and then move to heal the wounds.
The world has slowly started to move toward stricter regulation of environmental pollution, such as the reductions in carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and sulfur compounds from combustion of fossil fuels, and prohibitions against the use of CFCs, which destroy the ozone layer.
This is not enough. The American NGO Worldwatch Institute, which has published State of the World for 15 years now, points out that "there is no more time to lose" and that national and international legislation to protect the environment is still not strict enough.
The Japanese government has been particularly slow in responding, but in February 1990 it announced a Synthetic Strategy Cosmo Plan I to retard the rate of Japan's contribution to the greenhouse effect. Although this plan is still not fully enacted or enforced, it shows Japan's growing consciousness of some responsibility for environmental pollution. Rather than focusing on Japan's domestic industrial pollution or energy problems, this plan proposes foreign technological aid to developing countries and international leadership in monitoring and protecting the environments of developing trade partners.
The Japanese government is also urging private and corporate research institutes to develop nuclear, solar, and geothermal energy sources—clean energy that will not produce greenhouse gases or acid rain—and to develop substitutes for CFC refrigerants and detergents that will avoid the destruction of the ozone layer. Foreign nations are pressuring Japan to ban CFCs as they have done; Japan will surely follow suit as soon as its industries find suitable substitutes. Here again we find that in financial and industrial circles the profit motive still exceeds concern for the environment.
There are hopeful developments on the horizon. One promising product is biodegradable plastic, manufactured by microorganisms from organic matter. When disposed of in water or soil, it readily biodegrades and releases no toxic residues. Biodegradable plastic will soon be used for everything from wrapping paper to fishing nets. At last, technology at the end of this century has begun to work to save our green planet from the destruction of the environment that we brought upon ourselves.
Compared to the six billion people in the world, very few people are even aware of, much less engaged in this movement. Besides, there is a limit to what technology can do to improve the natural environment. It is impossible to rejuvenate nature completely by technology alone. What else can we do?
Start With an Appreciation of Nature
Humans cannot live without nature. Therefore we should respect nature and treat it considerately. In a sense, the idea of saving the earth is itself a human conceit. The earth has enabled us to stay alive. It has given us air to breathe, food to eat, clothes to wear, places to live, the warmth of the daytime and the peace of night, and it has absorbed our waste.
Can we save this earth? What we must save first is not the earth; it is our hearts and minds that have forgotten how precious the natural environment really is. We are losing our beautiful natural environment because we failed to appreciate it, following only our desires for material comfort, blind to the long-range consequences of our choices of lifestyles.
In our medieval ignorance, the earth looked so limitless that it could never be polluted. Today, we know better and have no further excuse for polluting it. We must