Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 12, 1994 TAG: 9410210001
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
We tried to, for a while - at least until the memories faded of long lines at the gas pumps following the '73 foreign-oil embargo.
Today, though, the United States uses almost as much oil as it did in 1973 (and imports more of it now than then). Today, each of us consumes an average of 55 barrels of oil yearly - mostly to drive cars and trucks about 1 trillion more miles a year than we drove in '73.
All told, the United States, accounting for about 2 percent of the world's population, consumes about a quarter of all the world's commercial energy, which comes principally from fossil fuel: oil, gas and coal. Along with other industrialized nations, we are still wasteful - some would say crudely so.
Which is to remind us: The United Nations' international conference in Cairo, now finishing up, isn't simply about contraception and abortion, though one might think so from the Vatican-led controversy that dominated news from the conference last week.
As important as it is to develop a global plan for stabilizing population growth, the world's serious attention must also be directed to conserving the world's finite natural resources, and to the need for richer nations like the United States to examine and adjust their all-consuming patterns and lifestyles. The fact is that world development isn't sustainable if developing nations all successfully follow our example.
``Yes, spiraling numbers of people account for rampant natural-resource destruction,'' writes Jay D. Hair, president of the National Wildlife Federation, in the fall edition of International Wildlife magazine. But lowering birthrates in developing countries isn't the sole solution. Even if population stabilized at today's numbers, says Hair, current consumption patterns and consumption disparities among nations can't be sustained.
Energy is not the half of it. In the same magazine, Don Hinrichsen, a United Nations consultant on environment and population issues, documents how population and lifestyle trends are devouring numerous other natural resources: water, agricultural land, forests, plants and animals. And while all the world's residents are guilty, the poorest and richest are most guilty.
``Poverty compels the world's 1.2 billion bottom-most poor to misuse their environment and ravage resources, while lack of access to better technologies, credit, education, health care and family-planning condemns them to subsistence patterns that offer little chance for concern about their environment,'' observes Hinrichsen. This contrasts with the richest 1.3 billion people, who consume disproportionate amounts of resources and generate disproportionate quantities of waste.
It should not be a source of national honor that each of us in America consumes 23 times more goods and services than the average Third World citizen. It's nothing to boast about that there are fewer high schools in the United States than shopping centers - to which, of course, everyone drives in his or her own car. We can hardly be proud that pollution and trash - with each American producing about 52 tons of the stuff by age 75 - are among our grossest national products.
So let the Cairo conference remind us: While we hope to set a good example for developing countries in terms of enlightened attitudes about family planning and education of women, we in the West also need to change the example we set in terms of consumption patterns.
by CNB