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On the
Role of American Religious Communities
The Church Center at the United Nations MDGS in Focus Session One: Poverty, the Environment and Goal 8
Speech given by Professor Don
Melnick, Executive Director,
By way of background, I came to this process from a different place than probably most others. I am a biologist. I am a professor at Columbia University and I work on wild animal populations. So the first thing I can tell you about my thirty years of working with wild animals is that I work specifically on primates ~ a group of mammals to which humans belong. And the first thing you learn when you work on primates is never get between primates and their food. And that’s exactly what I’ve done…gotten between you and your lunch. So that’s a real problem and I am going to try to do something about that by moving as quickly as possible through my comments.
I really want to illustrate to you the severity of the problem that exists right now in our natural environments. It is one of the most severe problems that we face. And because of that, we [the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Environmental Sustainability] have distilled our argument into one sentence; “Environmental sustainability is essential to achieving all other Millennium Development Goals.”
We say that because, from our perspective ~ that is, the perspective of the Task Force ~ the links between the environment and many of the other problems that people are facing around the world are very clear. Unless we really address the issue of environmental degradation, we are only going to have short-term successes. John McArthur (1) talked about a plan to achieve successes in reaching the MDGs. But the Task Force believes that if over the long term, we continue to see decay in the natural environments that surround us, many of the problems we thought we were solving will reoccur.
Many of you know about UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, the so-called Rio Summit, which was held in 1992. What many of you probably don’t realize is that that conference marked the 20th anniversary of the conference that was held in Stockholm in 1972. The conference held in Stockholm in 1972 generated a whole set of goals and a whole set of ideas about the environment that were essentially reinvigorated 20 years later because almost nothing had been accomplished in that arena.
Out of the Rio Summit came the Rio Declaration. Countries signed it; tremendous rhetoric, plans, exhortations, and ten years later, essentially nothing had happened. So ten years later, we had Rio +10. This time the conference was held in Johannesburg. Some of you may have been there. So now we are thirty plus years into having developed comprehensive plans and delivering great exhortations about what should be done in the environment. But virtually nothing has happened; in fact, things have gotten considerably worse. So we might ask ourselves after thirty years, actually now, thirty-three years later, how are we doing? I think that’s a reasonable question to ask.
Well, I would say we’ve got problems… big, fundamental problems.
First of all, degradation of land eco-systems. About 10 million hectares or 25 million acres of forest are destroyed every year. They are converted for some other land use. That figure is for 1990-1997; it’s actually gotten much worse. Much of this, probably three-quarters of it, is illegal and that wood shows up in all of the countries that John mentioned who are supposed to be giving their 0.7 percent of GDP to achieving the MDGs. What they are not giving in that 0.7 percent they are using in part to buy the conversion of topical forests. You should know that the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has calculated that 25 % of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere every year is due to the conversion of forests to other land uses. That’s equivalent to the amount of carbon that the biggest carbon emitter in the world, the United States, emits through its factories and its cars. The world has pressured the U.S. to do something about its emissions. And yet, we do virtually nothing about an equivalent amount emitted into the atmosphere by cutting down and converting forests.
Instead, we see road building into forests, then tributary roads, then forests being burned. If you have ever been to the Amazon, you know that there is no electricity there. There are no street-lights there. This satellite image, taken at night, shows all the fires that are burning in the Amazon, not a new electrification program. The Amazon is literally being burned to the ground. In addition to that you have other activities such as mining, timbering, cattle ranching, and farming, all of this leading to about 25 to 30 million acres of forest disappearing every year, worldwide. What does that mean? Let me put this in really graphic terms. Take Borneo and Sumatra – two of the six biggest islands in the world. In eight years from now, both of those islands which twenty years ago were almost completely forested, will be completely clear-cut. They will have no forests left at all. In Borneo you can find some forest here, some forest there. It is going to be completely clear cut. Again, about three-quarters of that wood that is harvested is illegal. Most of it is going to China, and then much of it comes to the United States, Canada, and Europe as finished wood products. We are all responsible for the decline of tropical forests.
Destruction of aquatic eco-systems. Sixty to 70 percent of the world’s coral reefs have been destroyed or highly degraded. Take a standard fishing boat in an area where you might come to get fish. That boat is likely fishing using drag nets that they pull along and rake over the coral reefs that fringe a coastline. These heavy weighted nets scrape across the reefs, destroying the coral, and pull up all the fish. About 80% of that fish is dumped back into the ocean. It is called bi-catch, which means the fishermen don’t want it. The reefs are damaged and the fisheries are over exploited.
Accumulation of greenhouse gases. We know there are two ways in which greenhouse gases are sequestered or drawn down. They are drawn down by plants on land surfaces, by plants in the ocean, both in their processes of making their own food - photosynthesis. The plants on the land surfaces I mentioned to you before are being eliminated. This is a major way in which carbon is being emitted into the atmosphere. What has happened? For the last thirty-two years, we have seen a monotonic increase in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We have also seen a monotonic increase in the temperature. We can argue about whether those two are related, but most scientists believe that they are related. Deforestation is not the only source of carbon emissions, factories, trucks, and cars are other sources. We can argue about whether the upswing in atmospheric carbon is human caused or natural, but most credible scientists believe it’s human caused.
The decline of species. Really quickly, if you look at statistics of endangered species in 1996 and 2003, you will see the numbers in 2003 are greater than the ones in 1996. It still doesn’t look like a very big number…like 750 species of fish are endangered versus 28,000 species that we know about ~ not a big number. But if you look at how many fish species have actually been examined, you will see that 1500 have been examined and 750 are endangered. This means that roughly 1 out of every 2 species of fish that has been looked at is endangered. If you then extrapolate that to all the different kinds of organisms, vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants, you will see that about 6 out of every 10 species on this planet are now threatened. It is an extraordinary situation that the world is now in: 6 out of every 10. One of our closest zoological relatives: the orangutan will likely be extinct in the wild in your lifetime. What are we doing about it? Not very much.
Emerging infectious diseases. A lot of you have been reading about emerging infectious diseases. This gets a lot of play in the press. On the map I’m showing you here of emerging infectious diseases you can see they have emerged throughout the world. About 43 emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases came to the public’s attention between 1996 and 2001. About 75% of those are zoonotic. What does that mean? It means that they jumped from one animal species to the human species. This is happening with greater regularity; it is happening everywhere in the world and should you think you are immune to this, you shouldn’t; Lyme Disease is a very good example of this. And West Nile Virus which everyone is worried about is another very good example of this. In fact, if you really do a good biological, historical re-construction, you will see that HIV AIDS is another example of this; that a closely related virus jumped, in all likelihood, from chimpanzees into humans. It is a zoonotic disease that then became a pandemic because of the nature of the disease and the way it is spread. It is not only happening to humans. It is happening to all kinds of species around the world. Here is a papiloma virus that is now spreading to sea turtles around the world and their ocean migrations are a very good conveyor for moving the disease around.
Why should we care? Big deal. These things happen all the time. Species come and go. Landscapes change. What about the glaciations? The world looks different now, but its looked different in the past, so why should we care? And this gets back to the title of my talk, “What’s in it for me?” is an anthropocentric view. Why should WE as PEOPLE care about this. There are a number of very good reasons to care that are all based on self-interest.
For climate change impact, CO2 going up, temperature going up, what does that mean? It means sea level is going up. Why? Because when global temperatures go up, a lot of the water that is locked up in ice melts. If it is land ice that melts, it in fact has an effect on sea level. That doesn’t mean much for where we are right now, but if you are a small island state and your average elevation is about two to three feet above sea level, your country is beginning to disappear . And that is literally happening. Countries are shrinking right now as sea level rises. That’s a big deal. That’s a good reason to care.
We are also experiencing what seem to be an elevated number of extreme weather events that have been associated, at least theoretically, with increased sea surface temperatures and land surface temperatures. We saw a series of those in Florida this year, tropical storms turning into hurricane force winds and causing massive destruction. But we have seen that around the world in lots of other places, as well. Another reason to care.
Decline of fresh water. Fresh water will probably be the most limited natural resource of the 21st Century. It is extraordinary how fast the sources of fresh water are declining, and we are seeing how little there is compared to the growing population that we have. Basically, we are destroying what are called the watersheds or the water basins. Those forested watersheds actually filter the water naturally. Billions and billions of dollars of filtration services are provided by nature. This is what we call an ecosystem service. It is an absolutely free service. Watersheds also control the quantity of fresh water, how fast the water comes out of the hills. But when a watershed is destroyed, what you have is massive amounts of water coming down when the rains hit and that water is heavily silted and very difficult to use. Then in large parts of the year, when you have no rain, there is no reserve water. In other words, a drought.
How about the collapse of the fisheries? I mentioned this before, the effect of the kind of fishing that we do. What it means is that we are destroying the very nurseries that put fish back into the ocean. There is also increasing world demand for fish from the oceans. So at the same time we are reducing the supply, we are increasing the demand. It is not too difficult to figure out what would happen. What happens is a collapse of the fisheries. You can see that in this set of graphs charting the amount of fish caught per 100 hooks put into the water. For the 19 most commonly harvested ocean fish, tuna, swordfish, and others, the numbers have declined by over 90 percent in the past 40 years. The global fisheries have collapsed. Let’s be honest. That’s why when you go to restaurants every year different fish show up on the menu. When I was a kid, I never heard of a monkfish. Now we are eating monkfish. I have spent a lot of time in developing countries and I always go to talk to the fishermen (e.g. Sri Lanka). Fishermen used to go out and catch large size fish. Now the average fish they are bringing in is maybe six inches in length. And so you can see that the fisheries are not being replenished. 1.6 billion people in the world depend on fish as their major protein source. That is a very large number of people. And in certain regions of the world, everyone depends on fish as their sole protein source, particularly in the Pacific.
Loss of pollination services. This is my favorite example. The Mexican Free-tailed Bat is your friend, you just don’t know it. Why is this bat so important? Because it is nocturnal like most bats and it feeds on insects. It is an insectivorous bat rather than a fruit-eating bat. They live in colonies of around 5-10 million bats per colony. These are most prevalent in Texas in the United States. They come out at night and they eat insects. A colony like this will eat on the order of 5-10 million metric tons of insects every night when they come out. And there are many colonies like this. A Doplar radar on a clear night with no clouds shows the bats coming out of the caves in Texas, covering an enormous area, eating insects as they come out. This service could not be substituted by using pesticides because it would make the feed corn too expensive; and it would probably make the feed corn unusable because it would be so laden with pesticides that you couldn’t feed it to your livestock. And yet this crop pest control service happens free of charge. But as we destroy these systems, we lose these services.
Mortality and morbidity. John McArthur talked a little bit about this, about leading causes of disease. Many of these diseases are actually related to environmental degradation. And certainly malaria, which is probably the second leading killer in the world, is related to changes in land use. The massive explosion in malaria when we thought we had it under control, much of it is actually related to standing water in rutted roads that were built to pull logs out of areas that previously were closed canopy forest.
But there is not only a human cost to the diseases brought on by environmental degradation. Though these costs are terrible enough. There’s also an enormous economic cost. Everyone knows about the cost of SARS, for instance. One episode of SARS cost roughly 50+ billion dollars to China’s and Canada’s economy. So there is an enormous economic cost as well.
Social displacement is another one. As these landscapes become more and more degraded, it becomes harder and harder to make a living. As this is happening in many places, you get massive influxes of people from the rural areas into cities. It is just impossible to survive in the rural areas. Here again, environmental degradation is leading to a huge social change. This migration has been so one-sided and so persistent that 2007 will be the first year in the history of the world in which more people will live in cities than in rural areas. It is predicted by the U.N. that in the next 50 years 2/3 to 3/4 of the population will be urban. And associated with that trend is social dislocation, unemployment and violence, whether it is local violence or actually on a national scale.
So my argument, and the argument that we have made in the MDG7 Task Force report, and the reason why we said that environmental sustainability was essential to achieving all of the Millenium Development Goals, is that all of the basic things we think human beings need to survive like water, food, their health, non-lethal weather conditions, at least a minimum amount of currency to get the things they need, and their personal safety, link back to the condition of nature.
So let me put this in the starkest possible terms. You’ll have to forgive me for doing this. We had a tsunami in December, 2004. This occurred in places I have spent the last twenty-five years working. In Northern Sumatra, in coastal India, in Sri Lanka, in Kenya ~ I know these places very well. I was getting emails literally by the hour the wave of destruction moved across the Indian Ocean. About 250,000 people died in that tsunami. It was a horrible, horrible event. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be running from a wall of water like that. So it is not surprising to me that this somehow galvanized the world’s attention. But let’s look at environmentally related deaths. Indoor/outdoor air pollution: approximately 250,000 people die every month because of that. Every month. Not once, but every month of every year. About 250,000 people die every month from biological and chemical water pollution. Every month, every year. About 250,000 people die every month from insect-born diseases that are at least in part exacerbated by environmental degradation. And about 250,000 people die every month from malnutrition and low body weight that is due at least in part to soil depletion, to drought conditions, to the collapse of fisheries, to declining productivity ~ all environmental causes. All of these are happening every month, yet we see very little attention focused on these deaths.
This is usually where the environmentalists, “tree huggers,” end their comments and they sort of leave you thinking that the world is going down the drain and that’s the end of it. So I talked about what the problems were. I talked about why they really matter. But what I would say is that no presentation would really be complete unless you talk about how to fix it. That’s what we are talking about here; how do you fix these problems. Not just a long litany of problems. The reason I presented this set of issues and what it means is that I want you to understand the direct connections between the environment and every other aspect of our life.
Okay. So the Millenium Development Summit happened in September of 2000 as John McArthur described. They agreed upon eight Millennium Development Goals, which you can read about; you are focusing on 8. I have been focusing on 7. MDG7 is about achieving environmental sustainability and if you read the wording of the goal, you will see that it is really quite compelling language. Two years later, we find ourselves in Johannesberg and not much has been done toward meeting the MDGs. So, the Millenium Project was subsequently formed to recommend a Plan of Implementation by 2005 for achieving the MDGs and thereby improving the human condition by 2015.
In the Plan of Implementation, we have operational priorities, organizationally how this is to be done, how is the financing to occur; again, perfectly reasonable. The Millenium Project was divided into ten task forces, actually more than this, this was the initial break up, but several more were added. You can see from this list that we were Task Force 6 and these are the people who were involved. I won’t dwell on that because I know that time is short, but I did co-chair the Task Force with Yolanda Kakabadse, the former Environment Minister of Ecuador and Jeffrey McNeeley, who is the Chief Scientist at the World Conservation Union. The task force members came from all over the world and our charge was to develop an action plan for achieving environmental sustainability. We met in different parts of the world. We met in Ecuador, in Indonesia, in Thailand. And we released this document, the Task Force report, as a penultimte version with the Secretary General in January, but in its final form in March, 2005. Let me talk about some of the recommendations of the Task Force.
We divided our recommendations between environmental management and structural changes because both of them need to take place. First, let me restate our most important point: Environmental sustainability is essential to achieving all of the other Millenium Development Goals. I will probably repeat this again. This point comes from a particular view of the world I laid out for you earlier. So what are we saying about environmental management?
We have to improve small scale agriculture. Most agriculture is done on a small scale. Most of it is not done sustainably; most of it leaves the soils depleted and most of it eventually leads to the collapse of those agricultural lands. People can’t move on anymore; the world is just too filled up with people and so they are stuck with lands that don’t produce.
Promote forest management for protection and sustainable production. We are not saying put a rope around forests and don’t cut any trees. That’s just not reality. Reality is that we have to pull trees out of forests. People have been doing this forever. But since there are so many people now, we have to be very conscious of the way we do it. We have to do it in a sustainable way and one thing we really have to do ~ and I’ll get to this in a minute ~ is end both unsustainable and illegal timbering which is rampant. It is an absolute disease across the face of the earth.
Combat the threat to fresh water resources and ecosystems. As I said to you before, unless we get a handle on fresh water, and we do not have a handle on fresh water right now, this is going to become a huge problem. There are many people around the world who do not have access to fresh water. If you want to talk about why people die at 250,000 per month from chemical and biological pollution of the water, that’s the reason. We do not have sustainable systems for managing fresh water. It is an enormous problem, and growing. In our report, we talk about ways that water might be managed in an integrated fashion.
Address the threats to fisheries. Again, this is an enormous problem. I mentioned to you 1.6 billion people living on fish for their protein source. Right now, fishing is out of control; completely out of control in most places of the world. There are ways to bring it under control. If I borrow from John McArthur’s words, there are ways that are not very expensive and there are ways that will not incur a huge economic loss to anyone. You just have to want do it.
Address the drivers of air and water pollution. As the numbers I showed you indicated, this is a huge killer around the world. And some of these projects, as John rightfully pointed out, have done a great job at reducing the amount of poverty, at the expense of air quality that is killing millions of people. I am talking about South and South East Asia right now, but even in the big, bustling cities of Latin America, air quality is dangerously poor and a particular problem for the poorest people who have to live with that air quality.
Mitigating anticipated effects of global climate change. I think we are kidding ourselves if we don’t think that we have to move towards non-carbon based energy technologies. We probably have about fifty years maximum to make major progress in this area. If we don’t get there, we are going to be in big trouble. Very big trouble. We are going to incur a lot more expense than it will cost to make this transition. However, we would also be kidding ourselves if we didn’t think we will experience the effects of global climate change. We will. So we need to take steps to adapt to those changes.
Everyone has been talking about strengthening institutions and governance. That is key. We must correct market distortions that as someone said before have to do with subsidies. Subsidies to fishing, to forestry, and to farming make it difficult for developing countries to bring their commodities to market and thus are adding to the difficulties these economies are having. They also underwrite inefficient, destructive extraction practices. We need to improve access to the use of scientific knowledge and build environmental sustainability into all development projects. We can’t talk about environmental sustainability on the one hand and on the other hand give money to promote unsustainable projects. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Perhaps one difference between this report and others in the past is that we are working with real countries in real time to implement the Task Force recommendations that make sense in their national context. The first two countries we are working with are Papua New Guinea and the Dominican Republic. In each country achieving environmental sustainability in their key natural resource sectors has been given a high priority. But this priority has been put in the context of economic growth. What we now call, “environmentally sustainable economic growth.”
So, where do religions and religious leaders come into this picture? To me, this is a key question. As I said earlier, millions of people die every year because of environmental degradation. Religious communities all over the world were able to galvanize and to bring support to the people who needed it after the Indian Ocean tsunami and they are now reconstructing their homes, schools, and livelihoods. So if we do nothing as religious communities and other groups in the face of the knowledge of the millions who die of environmental causes, then we are the willing executioners of these people. As far as I am concerned, this is unacceptable. It is probably unacceptable to all of you. Now the question is how do we galvanize the various religious communities to do something about this problem. This is not “tree hugging.” This is millions and millions of lives. It is, I think, one of the most important issues we face today. It is a moral imperative.
My argument would be that even if you are person who really doesn’t love nature, who really doesn’t care whether you pass on to your grandchildren a world that is roughly similar to yours, there is still a place for you in this issue. If to you nature is a tiny little park in a big city with cars going by honking their horns, where you can step into an air-conditioned building at a moments notice. There is still a place for you. And why? Because all of the things that you care about while living in a city, say New York City, the water you drink, the food you eat, the diseases you catch, the extreme weather events that will harm you, the money you have, and your own personal safety, link back to nature and the condition that nature is in.
Environmental degradation not only affects you, but it differentially affects the poor and the weak. There is no question about that. And if allowing such things to go on is a sin, as most of you have said, whatever religion you come from, then letting poor people suffer the consequences of environmental degradation is a sin and we are committing this sin on a very large scale right now.
So, can we achieve environmental sustainability? I’ll close with a little story. When I was a teenager, my parents decided to move back into New York City. I was born in New York City, but we followed the trend out to the suburbs in the 1950’s. When we returned in the 1960’s the air quality was unimaginably bad, as this picture indicates. Today, as this other picture indicates, the air has improved considerably. Why? Because people decided that it was detrimental to their health and because the city’s leaders decided that it was detrimental to business, and everyone did something about it. If we decide that the environmental conditions and all of the negative associated effects are detrimental to our health, detrimental to conducting all other human affairs, and an unacceptable burden on the poor, I think we will do something about it.
That is my charge to you. Help the world do something about the problem of environmental degradation.
Thank you very much.
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