MB Civic

[Not to diminish the environmental dangers to our water and air, I found this in my file yesterday, and felt it well worth re-reading.]

The Earth As an Apple

Consider the earth as an apple, and imagine the following sequence:

1.  Slice the apple into quarters.  Set aside three of the four quarters.  These represent the oceans of the world.  The fourth quarter represents the total land area left.

2.  Slice this quarter in half.  Set aside one of the pieces.  This land is inhospitable to people – polar areas, deserts, swamps, very high or rocky mountainous areas.  The other 1/8 piece is the land area where people live – but not necessarily where they grow the foods needed for life.

3.  Slice this piece into four sections.  Set aside three of these pieces.  These are areas too rocky, too wet, too cold, too steep or with soil too poor to produce food.  They also include areas of land that have been used for highways, suburban developments, shopping centers, and other man-made structures.

4.  This leaves us with a 1/32 slice of the earth.  Carefully peel this slice.  This tiny bit of peeling represents the surface, the very skin of the earth’s crust upon which mankind depends.  Less than five feet deep, it is a quite fixed amount of food-producing land.

Advanced agricultural technology has enabled the world to feed many of its people.  But with a fixed land resource base, and an ever-increasing number of people trying to feed themselves from that fixed base, each person’s portion becomes smaller and smaller.  And erosion and pollution of land makes that portion smaller still.

We must protect the environmental quality of our air, our water – and our land.