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 he fast-evolving information economy is affecting
every facet of our lives, but it is environmental trends that
will ultimately shape the new century, says the Worldwatch Institute
in State of the World 2000, its first report in the new
millennium.
 In the
United States, the rapidly growing information economy has created
millions of jobs and helped drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average
of stocks from less than 3,000 in early 1990 to over 11,000 in
1999. "Caught up in the growth of the Internet," said
senior author Lester Brown, "we seem to have lost sight
of the Earth's deteriorating health. It would be a mistake to
confuse the vibrancy of the virtual world with the increasingly
troubled state of the real world."
"When
we launched this series of annual assessments in 1984, we hoped
that we could begin the next century with an upbeat report, one
that would show the Earth's health improving," said Brown.
"But unfortunately the list of trends we were concerned
with then -- shrinking forests, eroding soils, falling water
tables, collapsing fisheries, and disappearing species -- has
since lengthened to include rising temperatures, more destructive
storms, dying coral reefs, and melting glaciers. As the Dow Jones
goes up, the Earth's health goes down."
One key trend
affecting the entire world is rising temperature, which is melting
glaciers from the Peruvian Andes to the Swiss Alps. In late 1991,
hikers in the southwestern Alps discovered an intact human body,
a male, protruding from a glacier. Apparently trapped in a storm
some 5,000 years ago and quickly covered with snow and ice, his
body was remarkably well preserved. In 1999, another body was
found in a melting glacier in the Yukon Territory of western
Canada. "Our ancestors are emerging from the ice with a
message for us: The Earth is getting warmer," said Brown.
In a surprise
finding, the study reports that the number of people who are
over-nourished and overweight now rivals the number who are undernourished
and underweight, each group containing roughly 1.2 billion people.
Other chapters assess the issue of persistent organic pollutants,
the future of paper, the information economy, micropower technologies,
and environmental job creation.
"The
scale and urgency of the challenges facing us in this century
are unprecedented," said Brown. "We cannot overestimate
the urgency of stabilizing the relationship between ourselves,
now 6 billion in number, and the natural systems on which we
depend. If we continue the irreversible destruction of these
systems, our grandchildren will never forgive us. As the report
notes, 'Nature has no reset button.'" 
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worldwatch.org; website www.worldwatch.org.