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.
Perhaps most ridiculous of all is the suggestion that we 'keep' our radioactive garbage for the use of our descendants. This 'solution', I think, requires an immediate poll of the next 20,000 generations.
Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn't understood it.
Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.
Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been.
The first footfalls on Mars will mark a historic milestone, an enterprise that requires human tenacity matched with technology to anchor ourselves on another world.
I don't walk into the lab in the morning thinking, 'I am a woman, and I will carry out an experiment that will conquer the world.' I am a scientist, not male or female. A scientist.
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