Publisher's Synopsis
The most difficult challenge the world faces is: how to build an environmentally sustainable economy before we do permanent damage to the natural systems that support our global civilization. From the thinning of the Arctic sea ice to the invasion of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, "State of the World 2001" shows how the economic boom of the 1990s has damaged natural systems. The increasingly visible evidence of environmental deterioration is only the tip of a much more dangerous problem: the growing inequities in wealth and income between countries and within countries, inequities that will generate enormous social unrest and pressure for change.;The award-winning researchers of the Worldwatch Institute argue that to solve the earth's environmental problems, we must simultaneously address the problems of the world's poor peoples. The book demonstrates that there are ways of rapidly improving the environment and meeting the material needs of the 6 billion individuals on earth. More than 10 million people have already benefited from small loans from micro-credit programmes like those pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and BancSol in Bolivia, and farmers in developing countries are converting to organic agriculture to grow organic foods for export to industrial countries.
