In the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the critical issue of water supply scarcity as populations grow in the Middle East, affecting food production.
Lester R. Brown points to a pressing global crisis in the Middle East where rapid population growth outpaces the available water supply, leading to a decline in grain production. This unprecedented situation illustrates the challenges of sustainability and resource management as more people require food, yet the water necessary for irrigation is diminishing, posing serious threats to food security and regional stability.
In practice
In a speech addressing climate change at a conference, this quote could emphasize the urgency of global water scarcity.
Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it.
Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.
I don't have an issue with what you do in the church, but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me they've got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. Because that's when we're going to fight.
We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
For the record: Quantum mechanics does not deny the existence of objective reality. Nor does it imply that mere thoughts can change external events. Effects still require causes, so if you want to change the universe, you need to act on it.
It was unthinkable not long ago that a biologist or paleontologist would be at the same conference as an astrophysicist. Now we have accumulated so much data in each of these branches of science as it relates to origins that we have learned that no one discipline can answer questions of origins alone.
We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we'll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.
When you're in a spacecraft, you need to know what things you can touch and what things you shouldn't touch!
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