Global Consumption  In a series of discussions on Earth Day, I
found myself returning to two 1970s reports by the Club of Rome:
The Limits to Growth and Mankind at the Turning Point. While
those analyses were weak on policy design, they did a thorough
job of describing the interconnected set of problems that remain
at the heart of the world's environmental crisis. By a
combination of population growth, economic growth, the pattern
of material consumption and ignorance, human impact on
environmental systems threatened to damage those systems and
their ability to sustain human life. Those threats continue four
decades later. Climate change is one of the obvious impacts of
human activity, but it is by no means the only impact and it may
not be the most difficult to address. Our production of
chemicals that have toxic impacts on ecosystems and harm a
variety of living species (including the human variety) may
prove to be more difficult to mitigate than climate change. The
fact is we do not know enough about human