Summary: This page introduces the global crisis and links to support pages.
Consider an article published on October 25, 2007, in the New York Times, U.N. Warns of Rapid Decay of Environment, by James Kanter:
PARIS, Oct. 25 — The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage to the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations.
Climate change, the rate of extinction of species, and the challenge of feeding a growing population are putting humanity at risk, the United Nations Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.
'The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns,' Achim Steiner, the executive director of the Environment Program, said in a telephone interview.
Over the last two decades, the world population increased by almost 34 percent, to 6.7 billion, from 5 billion. But the land available to each person is shrinking, from 19.5 acres in 1900 to 5 acres by 2005, the report said.
Population growth combined with unsustainable consumption has resulted in an increasingly stressed planet where natural disasters and environmental degradation endanger people, plants and animal species.
This article, reporting on the U.N. Global Environmental Outlook Report 4, is replicated on virtually a daily basis. Within this story, we can extract a basic theme, revealed by the shrinking amount of land per person: overshoot. If within markets supply exceeds demands, prices rise and thus additional supply is evoked and demand declines, moving toward a new equilibrium. But supply and demand are artifacts, human events. Carrying capacity exists within nature, largely apart from human influence. The basic conundrum of overshoot is too much human-induced load relative to the capacity of an ecosystem to sustain. The result is crash, as in a sharp decline in population, and often a diminished carrying capacity. Overshoot implies limits to growth and forces social choices; markets evade such responsibilities and limits.
The coverage of the unfolding global crisis starts with this story. This web site on global crisis is divided into four topics, then divided again into components. The topics are:
Themes such as Peak Oil, climate change, population increases, growing trends in world hunger, deforestation, extinction, and indicators of sustainability -- a consolidated but broad and interacting list of empirical concerns. Then
Data, including global crisis related sites, overall trends, resources, and cases. This provides a sense of interconnection and dimension among the otherwise scattered fragments that explain the global crisis.
Paradigms provide general frames of reference, most of which are uncomfortable, but synthesize scenarios from trends and data. These include Limits to Growth, collapse, the End of Suburbia, overshoot, I=P*C*T, World vs. Earth, double movement. These paradigms provide insight and vision, extending the themes and trends offered above. They should be prominent in the discussion of global crisis.
Action Agenda involves the threefolding ensemble of government, the private sector, and civil society organizations. The agenda points to policies, programs, innovations that are formulated more specifically in the enabling analysis section.