Gmail - Fw: The Chinese CenturyThe characteristic sequence of causes and effects of wars is: growth of functional parameters of a society (population density, shortage of natural resources, production and consumption etc.) creates a critical situation and the activity directed towards outside world for the solution of a problem.

Foreign Policy In Focus Special Report: Risk-transfer Militarism and the Legitimacy of War after IraqHow do we evaluate the legitimacy of this new way of war? The principal moral tools that we have available derive from the just war tradition. According to this tradition, as is well known, both ends and means have to be just.

Foreign Policy In Focus Special Report: Risk-transfer Militarism and the Legitimacy of War after Iraq1 Killing the enemy :The principal risks of being killed (as a direct consequence of military action) are actually applied to enemy armed forces, rather than to civilians. In a historic sense, this is a transfer of risk back from enemy civilians towards the enemy military as such, and appears to reverse (at least for Western campaigns) the long twentieth-century trend towards overwhelmingly civilian casualties. This is clearly of great significance for arguments about the legitimacy of war.

Foreign Policy In Focus Special Report: Risk-transfer Militarism and the Legitimacy of War after Iraq: "It is the argument of this paper that these wars are examples of a new Western way of war. This ?new? war is not, of course, entirely new. It is a reinvention of the reliance on airpower that has been central to Anglo-American military thought and practice since the 1920s. The new mode relies on bombing ? by both manned bombers and cruise missiles ? as well as long-range artillery, even more than before. However it uses the enhanced precision that computer electronics brings to targeting (the so-called ?Revolution in Military Affairs?) to avoid the large-scale and widespread massacres of enemy civilians that occurred in the Second World War and Vietnam. It uses local allies to carry out as much as possible of the actual fighting on the ground. And it uses media management to mitigate the effects of the ?small? massacres that ?accidentally? happen, as well as of the (sometimes larger) numbers of indirect casualties. "

The Daily Star - Opinion Articles - Make the Security Council more effective: "The need for an effective UN Security Council reflects the central strategic certainty of the post-Cold War period: Security threats are no longer likely to take the form of war between states, but will instead consist in acts of terror, civil wars and massacres of civilian populations. These threats are often related to economic chaos and basic failures in national governance, and international military action will often be needed to meet them head on. But the legitimacy of any international military action that goes beyond immediate self-defense requires broad international approval - and action without legitimacy is bound to fail."

People's Daily Online -- Why America always picks at China?: "In the 'US National Strategy Report', the Bush administration clearly stated: The United States is to maintain its super-class military strength in its advantaged position, so as to 'stop the potential enemies who hope to surpass or rival US strength'; 'we will ensure sufficient military force so as to fulfill our obligations and defend freedom. "

A New World Order: "How would we use those today? One of the things that has been interesting with the Richard Clarke book and the 9/11 Commissions has been the evidence that one of the principal culprits of the failure to prevent 9/11 was the failure to take terrorism seriously because of a lingering Cold War mentality. It was fixed in our heads that only states can do real damage, not non-state actors. And we of course deal with states in traditional ways: we go to war, we have economic sanctions, and we threaten them in various ways. "

A New World Order: "A global policy network includes anyone who is interested. It includes nongovernmental organizations, independent experts, activists, scientists and international officials; it can also include the private sector. The idea is that to implement global policy, we need to harness everyone. "

A New World Order: "So why do I argue that these networks are so important? Because we face a governance trilemma. We need global capacity in virtually every area -- from the environment to labor to economic regulation to the management of public health. "

A New World Order: "You could now ask, ?So what? We have all these people talking to each other, networking; but the big issues of the day are in the arena of high politics -- terrorism, nonproliferation, ethnic conflict, and major (or at least potential) economic crises. Networking is what happens among bureaucrats. This isn?t relevant to world order in the grand terms that George Bush initially proclaimed it.?
The second half of my book says: ?Not so.' These networks are a critical dimension of any world order we hope to establish in this century to address the problems we face now and at least in coming decades. "

A New World Order: "terrorism is only one of at least five crimes committed by global criminal networks. Money laundering, arms trafficking, trafficking in people, trafficking in drugs, and even intellectual piracy round out the list. "

A New World Order: "Likewise in the NGO [non-governmental organization] world: we have seen the power of the human rights movement, the labor rights movement, the anti-globalization movement, the environmental movement, all of which consist of networks of organizations. They interact, coordinate, exchange information regularly, develop common practices, and operate globally while retaining their distinct (often national) identities. "

A New World Order: "her perception of this fearful new world appears to be more consistent with reality, for her world is one where governance takes place not through communication with nation-states? presidents, prime ministers, or international organizations, but through a complex global maze of government networks composed of courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and even legislatures -- all of whom are networking today with their counterparts abroad, creating a dense level of relations.
She concludes by telling us how these networks can become the solution to the globalization paradox. Although differences in viewing the world may remain, Ms. Slaughter believes there are ways to work together to ensure a more peaceful and secure world, and the ideas presented in her book just may be the answer. "

A New World Order: "For many of you, thinking about global governance is your occupation, for others a preoccupation, and with each new international crisis there is a concern about the asymmetric manner in which countries approach these major challenges. "

Colossus: The Price of America?s Empire: "But the economic deficit and the manpower deficit are not the most serious deficits that confront the American empire today. Far more serious in my view is the third deficit: the attention deficit.
The United States is an empire which has ADDS: attention deficit disorder syndrome. No sooner has it intervened in a foreign territory than its political elites and its electorate begin to grumble that it?s high time the boys came home. "

Colossus: The Price of America?s Empire: "More seriously, it?s clear that the U.S. has a manpower deficit within the military sphere. Those who, like Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, confidently argued that it would be possible to reduce the American military presence in Iraq to 110,000 within a matter of months, who at the beginning of this year were looking forward to a steady draw-down of America?s presence there, have been forced in the past few weeks to eat their words.
We are now in a situation in which a surprisingly high proportion of those people doing dangerous active service in the Iraq theater are National Guardsmen, what we in Britain used to call weekend soldiers. It has turned out to be a very long weekend for many of them. "

Colossus: The Price of America?s Empire: "Fully 46 percent of the Federal debt held in public hands today is in the hands of foreigners and in rising measure in the portfolios of the central banks of East Asia. The banks' consistent interventions to maintain exchange rate parity with the dollar over the past two or so years are the single best explanation for the otherwise astonishing fact that interest rates in this country remain still at levels not seen since the 1960s, despite these extraordinary deficits that under different circumstances would surely have increased long-term interest rates by several hundred basis points. "

Colossus: The Price of America?s Empire: ") In economic terms, the United States is a debtor empire in a way that Britain only became in the twilight of its existence as an empire. In its heyday, Great Britain was a net exporter of capital in a vast scale. One could legitimately refer to the British Empire as ?the world?s banker.? London was a financial market that existed primarily to channel British and indeed other European savings to the far corners of the developing world.
By contrast, the U.S. today is a society and an economy based on credit and borrowing that is ultimately borrowing from abroad. It?s not enough to understand America?s fiscal deficit; one has to look also at its current account deficit to grasp the magnitude of American indebtedness. "

Colossus: The Price of America?s Empire: "It is, after all, a characteristically British thing to do, to invade not only Iraq but also Afghanistan. These are territories familiar to the British imperial mind. When General Frederick Stanley Maude issued his first proclamation to the people of Iraq in March 1917, he declared, ?Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.? Sound familiar? It should. It?s precisely the language that has characterized American rhetoric on Iraq for more than a year now. "

Colossus: The Price of America?s Empire: "What I would like to do in the brief time I have is to suggest not only what is wrong with America?s peculiar empire, but to answer the most important question facing the world today: Why is it that such an economically wealthy, militarily powerful, culturally self-confident society as the United States of America is so very unsuccessful compared with other empires in the business of imposing its institutions on other societies? "

Colossus: The Price of America?s Empire: ", Mr. Ferguson believes that America is nothing less than the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. ?It is an empire,?he says, ?that could benefit the world if only we did not find being one so difficult and our empirical undertakings were not so often so short-lived.? "

Carnegie Council - Printer Friendly: "I am unable to construct a scenario by which an American invasion of Iraq, even if it is totally successful, would not generate more terrorism in the Middle East, because even if we win in Iraq, depose Saddam Hussein, install the government of our choice, we will have to run it for a long time because of the unsettled ethnic problems there. So Iraq becomes effectively an American protectorate. I simply cannot believe that that will not generate among young Arabs everywhere greater anti-Americanism and terrorism"

Carnegie Council - Printer Friendly: "The book is certainly not a road map to what kind of policy we should have toward Iraq. But one of the things that these five people from 1898 did was to help define what America's security interests were for them. It tended to be a territorial definition. We had to be sure that we had no hostile powers in our hemisphere. So we had to buy off the British and Canadians, we had to control the Caribbean, we had to go crashing into Central America all the time. But those were security interests. Then the security interests gets extrapolated as weaponry gets more far-reaching, and you get the Soviet security threat, which comes from 8,000 miles away. "

Carnegie Council - Printer Friendly: "By extrapolation, American security was certainly threatened by the Soviet Union during the Cold War because of the reach of their missiles and the ground threat to our allies in Western Europe. And, therefore, you could argue that we had to act in a somewhat imperial way toward NATO, both economically and politically - economically in that the dollar is the reserve currency, which many academics at least consider to be an imperial situation. I would like 'imperialism' to be seen as a neutral word, applying the extension of authority. "

Carnegie Council - Printer Friendly: "for imperialism: the extension of national authority over alien communities. 'Imperialism' was a good word for him.
A country can be imperialist even if it acquires no territory, as long as its authority is extended. This definition applies to the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. We were an imperial country, as the leader of the NATO alliance, we were the strongest power, our voice counted more than anybody else's. "

People's Daily Online -- China sees new record in power consumption: "In 2003, China's electricity consumption surged 15.4 percent over the previous year to 1.89 trillion kwh, setting a record high for the past 25 years. China predicts a total gap of about 30 million kw between electricity demand and supply this summer. This is the most severe power shortage since the 1980s, the SG has announced."

common spaces The " reverse process" evident in multilateralism for environmental management is to protect common spaces -- defined in terms of air,
atmosphere, land and oceans.

technological change By and large, technological change is incremental in nature. Revolutionary developments are unusual.

Technology "the constellation of tools, machinery, systems, and techniques that manipulate the natural world for human ends." This comes closer to Ruth Cowan's definition of technology as "tools to control their environments."
As such, technology is not separate from culture but rather an integral part of it. It is thus influenced by all the human beliefs, ideologies, traditions, social organizations, and behaviors that comprise culture. And cultural components themselves are always changing.

Two logically distinct routes There are in fact two logically distinct routes to the evolving match between organisms and their environments: either the organism changes to suit the environment, or the environment is changed to suit the organism. The first alternative is brought about through the process of natural selection, and the second is one possible outcome of the process of niche construction.

Rrole and the place of China in the world The end of the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union in particular, have changed the role and the place of China in the world. A unipolar world emerged; Marxism as an ideology was in decline and Socialism as a system of government was discredited. China was now playing the dual role as the sole balancing power to the US and as torchbearer for the Third World.

Headlines for Tuesday, July 20, 2004: "The Chinese economy soared by 9.1 percent last year while the number of people in absolute poverty rebounded by 800,000. The fact indicates that the country's ongoing economic growth momentum, unfortunately, has not been able to benefit those at the bottom of our society. The country's economy is still marching at an amazing pace of 9.7 percent in the first half of this year. Last year's setback in poverty reduction is a resounding warning that policy-makers should keep in mind."

Headlines for Tuesday, July 20, 2004: "The number of indigent Chinese with less than 637 yuan ($77) of annual net income rose by 800,000 in 2003. This is the first time the number increased since China began opening-up in the late 1970s, said a senior Chinese official "

The New York Times > International > Africa > Devastated by AIDS, Africa Sees Life Expectancy Plunge: "Africa is getting poorer and hungrier as life expectancy continues its steep decline in the countries hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic, according to a United Nations report released Thursday. It said infants born now in seven nations with high rates of H.I.V. infection could expect to live less than 40 years. "

Nicheconstruction: "Organisms, through their metabolisms, activities and choices, define and partly create their own niches. They may also partly destroy them. This process of organism-driven environmental modification is called 'niche construction.' Niche construction regularly modifies both biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection and, in doing so, generates forms of feedback that change the dynamics of the evolutionary process."

MercuryNews.com | 07/12/2004 | We, Robots: "In 2035, sleek humanoid robots that walk, talk and think will be as common as iPods....Yet the future is arriving, one bot at a time. Robots today conduct surgery, build cars and explore other planets. They're even living in our homes. The Roomba robotic vacuum cleans floors while the RoboMower trims lawns. It's not quite ``The Jetsons,'' but it's a start."

Imperialism Book Reviews - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Hamiltonians advocate a strong link between big business and the federal government and the pursuit of a foreign policy that reflects the interests of this alliance. Wilsonians are the school of high internationalist ideals, believing that the United States has a duty to spread democratic values and to respect and uphold the rule of international law. On the more isolationist side, Jeffersonians fear that international entanglements run the risk of involving the United States in unsavory alliances or in war; they thus champion a cautious and limited foreign policy, preferring that the country focus its energies on enhancing democracy at home. Finally, the Jacksonians are preoccupied with the physical security of the United States and the country?s economic well-being, defining such in largely populist terms. "

Small Times: News about MEMS, Nanotechnology and Microsystems: "By the middle of this century we should assume that we will need to double world energy production from its current level, with most of this coming from clean, sustainable, carbon dioxide-free sources. For worldwide peace and prosperity, it must be cheap. We simply cannot do this with current technology.
We will need revolutionary breakthroughs to find the clean, low-cost energy necessary for advanced civilization of the 10 billion souls we expect to be living on this planet before this century is out. "

CGD | Publications: "Summary: The debate over linking trade and workers? rights is often a dialogue of the deaf, with advocates on either side paying little attention to the scope for positive synergies between labor standards, development, and globalization. Instead, each side views the other as promoting positions that, intentionally or not, will impoverish poor people in poor countries. Opponents of global labor standards fear that these would undermine developing countries? comparative advantage in low-wage goods or be abused for protectionist purposes, there by denying people jobs. Advocates of standards argue that failure to include these in trade agreements increases inequality and leads to a race to the bottom for workers worldwide. "

U.S.own version of development
Development refers to improvements in the conditions of people’s lives, such as health, education, and income. It occurs at different rates in different countries. The U.S. under-went its own version of development. When it became an independent nation in 1776:
■ The average American earned about $1,000 a year in today’s dollars, compared with $30,000 today.
■ One in five children died before their first birthday, compared with about one in 143 today.
■ Less than 50% of white children, and almost no black children, went to school; today almost all American children finish primary school.
■ On average, Americans were about four times richer than the people of the world’s poorest countries; they are 100 times richer today.

CGD | Publications: "The stakes of the poor in trade policy are large: Free trade can help 500 million people escape poverty and inject $200 billion annually into the economies of developing countries, according to author William R. Cline. "

CGD | Research | Commission on Weak States and US National Security: "Terrorists training at bases in Afghanistan and Somalia. Transnational crime networks putting down roots in Myanmar/Burma and Central Asia.Poverty, disease, and humanitarian emergencies overwhelming governments in Haiti and Central Africa. A common thread runs through these disparate crises that form the fundamental foreign policy and security challenges of our time. These crises originate in, spread to, and disproportionately affect developing countries where governments lack the capacity, and sometimes the will, to respond.In the most extreme cases, these states have completely failed, as in Afghanistan, Haiti, or Somalia. In many others, states are not failed but weak. Governments are unable to do the things that their own citizens and the international community expect from them: protecting people from internal and external threats, delivering basic health services and education, and providing institutions that respond to the legitimate demands and needs of the population. "

People's Daily Online -- US exercises test of new strategy: "On the one hand, the emergence of terrorism, proliferation of weapons, and increase of transnational crime has brought the post-Cold War world community more non-traditional security threats than traditional ones. Under the conditions of economic globalization, the consequences of the non-traditional factors always go beyond the borders of a single country, which could harm the national interests of the United States and the interests of the other nations as well. "

People's Daily Online -- US exercises test of new strategy: "To prevent the formation of an alliance against itself, the United States is attempting to set up a structure of balance under its domination so as to ensure a balance between the rising powers and key Asian nations that have not yet allied themselves with the United States. "

People's Daily Online -- US exercises test of new strategy: "The US Asia-Pacific strategy is a long-term and consistent one, which is to maintain peace and security under US domination, obtain commercial access to this region, ensure free navigation and prevent the rise of any hegemonic force or alliance. "

State of the World Trends and Facts: Making Better Energy Choices: "But the most significant driver of rising energy consumption for transportation is growing reliance on the private car. Some 40.6 million passenger vehicles rolled off the world?s assembly lines in 2002, five times as many as in 1950. The global passenger car fleet now exceeds 531 million, growing by about 11 million vehicles annually. About one fourth of those cars are found on U.S. roads, where cars and light trucks account for 40 percent of the nation?s oil use and contribute about as much to climate change as all economic activity in Japan does. The total distance traveled by Americans exceeds that of all other industrial nations combined."

State of the World Trends and Facts: Making Better Energy Choices: "Today, transportation is the world?s fastest-growing form of energy use, accounting for nearly 30 percent of world energy use and 95 percent of global oil consumption. Even relatively small shifts in transport choices have significant impacts. Only 0.5 percent of the total distance people travel each year is done by air, yet planes use up about 5 percent of transportation energy. "

State of the World Trends and Facts: Making Better Energy Choices: "Yet energy consumption is rising fastest in the developing world, where petroleum use alone has quadrupled since 1970. China is already the world?s number one coal consumer and the third largest oil user, while Brazil is the sixth largest oil consumer. Current trends in global energy use simply cannot be sustained: if the average Chinese consumer used as much oil as the average American uses, China would require 90 million barrels per day?11 million more than the entire world produced each day in 2001.
Through taxes and subsidies, regulations and standards, and investments in infrastructure, governments influence how, where, how much, and what form of energy we use. But we as consumers are not powerless bystanders. Ultimately, it is consumers who choose what to buy and how to use it, and thus it is consumers who can drive change."

State of the World Trends and Facts: Making Better Energy Choices: "Most surprising is the dramatic surge in energy use in many industrial countries. Compared with just 10 years ago, for example, Americans are driving larger and less efficient cars and buying bigger homes and more appliances. As a result, U.S. oil use has increased over the decade by nearly 2.7 million barrels a day?more oil than is used daily in total in India and Pakistan, which together contain more than four times as many people as the United States does. In total, the average American consumes five times more energy than the average global citizen, 10 times more than the average Chinese, and nearly 20 times more than the average Indian."

State of the World Trends and Facts: Making Better Energy Choices: "The energy required to support our economies and lifestyles provides tremendous convenience and benefits. But it also exacts enormous costs on human health, ecosystems, and even security. Energy consumption affects everything from a nation?s foreign debt to the stability of the Middle East, from the air we breathe to the water we drink,
The energy intensity?that is, the energy input per dollar of output?of the global economy is declining, and recent decades have seen continuing improvements in energy efficiency. Yet these encouraging developments are being offset by an ever-increasing level of consumption worldwide. Between 1850 and 1970, the number of people living on Earth more than tripled?yet the energy they consumed rose 12-fold. By 2002, human numbers had grown another 68 percent and fossil fuel consumption was up another 73 percent."

State of the World Trends and Facts: Making Better Energy Choices: "�Everything we consume or use�our homes, their contents, our cars and the roads we travel, the clothes we wear, and the food we eat�requires energy to produce and package, to distribute to shops or front doors, to operate, and then to get rid of.�"

Alternative futures: possible, probable, and preferable: "objective of futures studies:
act to enhance the probability of our preferable futures."

Alternative futures: possible, probable, and preferable: "Alternative futures: possible, probable, and preferable"

World Future Society 2004 Conference: "Will our planet have enough water in 2025? If oil was the critical liquid of the twentieth century, water will be the focus of attention in the twenty-first century. It can be argued that while civilizations can learn to live without oil, no human group has ever survived for long without access to a sustainable supply of fresh water. The tragedy is that most water shortages do not have to happen. In some locations, more than 85% of available water is lost due to leaks and wastage. Managing water well is the first step in alleviating poverty. "

World Future Society 2004 Conference: "It has been observed that the Stone Age did not end for lack of rocks. The Oil Age will similarly end long before the world runs out of oil. In fact, asking when oil will run out is the wrong question. Instead, a critical question for our time regarding the future is: How vital is it that we accelerate the end of the Oil Age? If this is a preferred future, what are the options? Is the anticipated 'hydrogen economy' a real alternative? If so, when? What are other alternatives?"

Limits to Growth :: Preface :: Chelsea Green Publishing: "Once the limits to growth were far in the future. Now they are widely in evidence. Once the concept of collapse was unthinkable. Now it has begun to enter into the public discourse--though still as a remote, hypothetical, and academic concept. We think it will take another decade before the consequences of overshoot are clearly observable and two decades before the fact of overshoot is generally acknowledged. The scenarios in this current volume show that the first decade of the twenty-first century will still be a period of growth--as did the scenarios in LTG 30 years ago. Our expectations for the 1970-2010 period therefore do not yet diverge much from those of our critics. "

Limits to Growth :: Preface :: Chelsea Green Publishing: "Overshoot--and subsequent decline--in societal welfare will result when society does not prepare sufficiently well for the future. Welfare loss will occur, for example, when there is no ready replacement for dwindling reserves of oil, for scarcer wild fish, and for more expensive tropical woods, once these resources start to deplete. The problem is worse when the resource base is erodible and gets destroyed during overshoot. Then society might experience collapse."

Limits to Growth :: Preface :: Chelsea Green Publishing: "We do not believe that available data and theories will ever permit accurate predictions of what will happen to the world over the coming century. But we do believe that current knowledge permits us to rule out a range of futures as unrealistic. Available facts already invalidate many people's implicit expectations of sustained growth in the future--they are just wishful thinking, attractive but erroneous, expedient but ineffective. Our analysis will be useful, if it forces citizens in the global society to reconsider and become more informed and respectful of the global physical limits that will play an important role in their future lives."

Limits to Growth :: Preface :: Chelsea Green Publishing: "Resource and emission constraints have created many crises since 1972, exciting the media, attracting public attention, and arousing politicians. The decline in oil production within important nations, the thinning of stratospheric ozone, the mounting global temperature, the widespread persistence of hunger, the escalating debate over the location of disposal sites for toxic wastes, falling groundwater levels, disappearing species, and receding forests are just a few of the problems that have engendered major studies, international meetings, and global agreements. "

Limits to Growth :: Preface :: Chelsea Green Publishing: "Dana was the unceasing optimist. She was a caring, compassionate believer in humanity. She predicated her entire life's work on the assumption that if she put enough of the right information in people's hands, they would ultimately go for the wise, the farsighted, the humane solution--in this case, adopting the global policies that would avert overshoot (or, failing that, would ease the world back from the brink). Dana spent her life working for this ideal.
Jorgen is the cynic. He believes that humanity will pursue short-term goals of increased consumption, employment, and financial security to the bitter end, ignoring the increasingly clear and strong signals until it is too late. He is sad to think that society will voluntarily forsake the wonderful world that could have been.
Dennis sits in between. He believes actions will ultimately be taken to avoid the worst possibilities for global collapse. He expects that the world will eventually choose a relatively sustainable future, but only after severe global crises force belated action. And the results secured after long delay will be much less attractive than those that could have been attained through earlier action. Many of the planet�s wonderful ecological treasures will be destroyed in the process; many attractive political and economic options will be lost; there will be great and persisting inequalities, increasing militarization of society, and widespread conflict."

Limits to Growth :: Preface :: Chelsea Green Publishing: "It now appears that the global per capita grain production peaked in the mid-1980s. The prospects for significant growth in the harvest of marine fish are gone. The costs of natural disasters are increasing, and there is growing intensity, even conflict, in efforts to allocate fresh water resources and fossil fuels among competing demands. The United States and other major nations continue to increase their greenhouse gas emissions even though scientific consensus and meteorological data both suggest that the global climate is being altered by human activity. There are already persistent economic declines in many localities and regions. Fifty-four nations, with 12 percent of the world population, experienced declines in per capita GDP for more than a decade during the period from 1990 to 2001."

Limits to Growth :: Preface :: Chelsea Green Publishing: "world society is still trying to comprehend the concept of sustainability, a term that remains ambiguous and widely abused even sixteen years after the Brundtland Commission coined it."

Limits to Growth :: Preface :: Chelsea Green Publishing: "The past 30 years have produced many positive developments. In response to an ever growing human footprint, the world has implemented new technologies, consumers have altered their buying habits, new institutions have been created, and multinational agreements have been crafted. In some regions food, energy, and industrial production have grown at rates far exceeding population growth. In those regions most people have become wealthier. Population growth rates have declined in response to increased income levels. Awareness of environmental issues is much higher today than in 1970. There are ministries of environmental affairs in most countries, and environmental education is commonplace. Most pollution has been eliminated from the smoke stacks and outflow pipes of factories in the rich world, and leading firms are pushing successfully for ever higher eco-efficiency."