in the ozone layer above the Antarctic.
Japan is the world's largest producer and consumer of CFCs and has refused to sign the international treaties restricting their use. This is another example of how the myopic drive for profit and convenience blinds consumers as well as manufacturers to the environmental consequences of their product choices.
Historical Functions of Forests
Imagine what it would be like if the trees in our neighborhood failed to put forth leaves in the spring, and all the trees withered and died like skeletons. The very thought is enough to make us shudder. In fact, satellite investigations have demonstrated that we are losing vast areas of forestland every year. This is due not only to global warming and acid rain, but also to the deforestation of the developing countries by the demands of developed countries for lumber and beef. Observing the destruction of our tropical forests, no one can fail to sense a grave danger.
Everyone knows that we cannot live without forests. We all unconsciously remember the fact that we humans evolved from forest-dwelling primates. We feel our bodies and souls energized and recharged when we walk through a forest. One reason is that plant photosynthesis turns carbon dioxide into oxygen. Another is that the air is purified and that plants moderate the temperature and humidity. So plants are both the sources of our oxygen supply and natural purifiers of our air. Plants act as the lungs of the earth, keeping our planet alive by circulating water, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide between the soil and the air.
Plants supply food for humans and innumerable other forms of life. Tropical forests also constitute environments for plant and animal life forms so numerous they have not even all been identified. But the vast variety of life in the tropics should not lull us into the illusion that it is unlimited; on the contrary, every year hundreds of tropical species become extinct.
We are now mutilating the lungs of the earth using the technology that we developed in order to make our daily lives more pleasant and affluent. As our emission of carbons and other atmospheric poisons exceeds the ability of the diminishing forests to reprocess them, we create an unsustainable imbalance that leads swiftly down the road to our own extinction.
Four and a half billion years have passed since the earth was born; three and a half billion years since the predecessors of modern plants produced enough oxygen for the most primitive of aerobic cells to evolve. It took over a billion years for the oxygen that primitive plants produced to constitute 20 percent of the air, making animal life as we know it possible. In a matter of a few centuries, humans could reverse this process and make the atmosphere incapable of supporting healthy animal life.
Humans were among the latest life forms to evolve. This was only several million years ago, a mere instant in the long history of the earth. Within a single century, humans have not only prospered but also endangered their natural environment to a critical extent. If human patterns of reproduction, consumption, industrialization, and destruction continue unchecked, the future not only of humanity but of life as we know it on this planet has very few centuries left.
Ocean Pollution
The ocean is becoming a gigantic pool of waste water. The excretion and drainage of 5.6 billion people living on the earth, industrial wastes and synthetic byproducts pouring out of factories, agricultural chemicals sprayed over vast farmlands, chemicals used for raising fish along the coasts, industrial and nuclear waste dumped directly from ships—these all flow into the ocean, continually escalating its level of pollution beyond its ability to recycle.
The most dangerous among recognized ocean pollutants are industrial wastes containing synthetic chemicals, and the insecticides and agricultural chemicals permeating the soil and flowing into the ocean in underground water. The American forces introduced DDT to Japan after the war; this was especially deleterious to the balance of nature and has lasting side effects on humans and many other living creatures.
The process of larger animals eating smaller animals that eat vegetable matter or plankton is a hierarchical order of nature called the food chain. Through the food chain, DDT is progressively accumulated in the bodies of living creatures: minute traces of DDT in plankton are concentrated in sardines, and redoubled in the fish that eat sardines. Eagles, hawks, and other large birds of prey that live on fish are especially contaminated by the highly concentrated DDT, and their hormone systems are destroyed. As a result, the number of birds of prey has decreased dreadfully.
The human waste, gray water, and sewage dumped into the oceans raise the levels of ammonia and phosphorus in sea water. This in turn has killed off several species of plankton and the small fish feeding on them. In turn, the larger fish which feed on the smaller fish begin to decrease, and as a result the balance of the entire ocean food chain has been disturbed. If this trend continues it will not only affect the catch of fish for direct human use but also destroy the ecological balance of the entire ocean ecosystem.
Every living creature on earth lives within the balance of the food chain. When this balance is destroyed and the number of a certain species increases or decreases unusually, other species are inevitably affected, and life as a whole is disordered. This can lead to the extinction of entire species.
The earth maintains its organic order in this way. We humans owe the continuity of our lives to this order. Nature is great, and those who oppose or upset it will perish. The philosophical principle of respect for nature indeed has a scientific justification.
DDT is not the only poison polluting the oceans. Dioxins from bleaching, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from plastic production, trihalomethanes, thermonuclear waste, and oil spills from wars and accidents have all disastrously polluted the world's oceans.
As the water cycle circulates pollutants from the troposphere to the subsoil and ultimately the oceans, living creatures all over the world have been polluted, from the stratosphere to the depths of the sea—birds and fish, penguins and polar bears, marine mammals and humans. In time, no organism nor ecosystem can escape the effects of this cycle of pollution.
The Limits of Science
As scientific reports from around the world have started to show the calamitous conditions of the earth, people have begun to understand that the earth is not limitless. More and more people have begun to sense the danger that we will destroy the entire planetary ecosystem during the next century unless we do something now to save the air, oceans, forests, and earth itself.
If someone were attacked by a thug and lay injured on the ground, we would immediately give first aid. Before pursuing those who destroy the environment, we must do our best to heal the earth. But if the criminals continue to injure it or threaten us, we must first subdue them, and then move to heal the wounds.
The world has slowly started to move toward stricter regulation of environmental pollution, such as the reductions in carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and sulfur compounds from combustion of fossil fuels, and prohibitions against the use of CFCs, which destroy the ozone layer.
This is not enough. The American NGO Worldwatch Institute, which has published State of the World for 15 years now, points out that "there is no more time to lose" and that national and international legislation to protect the environment is still not strict enough.
The Japanese government has been particularly slow in responding, but in February 1990 it announced a Synthetic Strategy Cosmo Plan I to retard the rate of Japan's contribution to the greenhouse effect. Although this plan is still not fully enacted or enforced, it shows Japan's growing consciousness of some responsibility for environmental pollution. Rather than focusing on Japan's domestic industrial pollution or energy problems, this plan proposes foreign technological aid to developing countries and international leadership in monitoring and protecting the environments of developing trade partners.
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