Four Reasons Why I Wrote NEAR JOURNEY'S END?

Four Reasons
Why I wrote
Near Journey’s End?


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005



History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

James A Garfield (1831 – 1881), 20th President of the United States

When I was a young man full of myself, fresh out of the industrial chemical research laboratory, and working as a chemical sales engineer, I read Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson. Her book was an angry outcry against the use of DDT and other chemicals affecting our air, land, and water.

With technical arrogance, I agreed with the editorials in Chemical & Engineering News that she was a poor chemist, which she was, and that her argument didn't hold water much less relevance to industrial progress, which it did. It never occurred to me to question this assessment, or to make note of the fact that industrial chemists had a vested interest in these chemicals.

I remained full of myself, and full of youthful success, as I traveled for my company to South America, Europe, and South Africa.

A conversation with a South African executive whose company was dumping pollutants into the Indian Ocean off the coast of East London still rings in my ear:

"They're just ignorant, these reporters and bureaucrats," he said with disdain in his voice, "how could they be expected to understand the ocean absorbs these wastes with ease?"

The chemicals were run offs from automobile and chemical factories. I nodded with approval believing in my ignorance for him to be correct.

My travels to the bauxite (aluminum) refineries in Jamaica, Suriname, and Venezuela often found me driving through shantytowns, rural villages and open country where I would often pass contaminated rivers and small lakes. Always, I would say to myself, no problem, they'll purify themselves.

Yet, even then, in the 1960s, I saw dried up river beds, abandoned factories, and parched farms, and gave it no mind. The canary was still in the mind.

In South Africa, I lived in the lap of luxury, a gardener, chauffeur, maid, and manservant to manage the estate, and organize the meals. I was just barely out of my twenties, an Iowa boy completely out of his depth in the world of dying colonialism.

The business people in the company were all British, the technical people mainly Afrikaners, and the servants all Bantu, far from their homelands and families. I gave them no mind. It was a leisurely existence entirely in keeping with the fading glory of the British Empire. This is what it's like to be rich and privileged, I thought; this is what it is like to be part of the oligarchy. Instead of being embarrassed coming from such a humble beginning, I was reveling in it. I had arrived!

Then a neighbor’s Bantu servant murdered my gardener over the affections of my maid. It was handled as if a dog had died. I attempted to participate in the inquest, but was told it was not necessary. Another neighbor, a British anthropologist, teaching at Witwatersand University, informed me, "Life is not that precious to the Bantu." I had heard the same thing said of Orientals, shocking me into awareness at its absurdity.

Suddenly, I was aware of being in a very strange society. I started to notice things, things I denied seeing before. I was on a green island in a black sea in which the white population of 3.5 million governed and controlled the wealth of the land, and occupied 83 percent of the geography, while 12.5 million of Bantu natives, Coloreds, and Indians occupied 17 percent of the land, had few rights, could not own land or vote, and lived in constant fear.

Neither my pastor nor the Irish nuns of my children’s school seemed concerned about the government’s policy of “apartheid,” or separate development of the races. Instead, I was told to enjoy this beautiful country and its people. It was as if this, too, was not something for me to think about. I had to escape or die. I was living a lie. I would resign after completing the assignment.

That was more than thirty years ago. It triggered my interest in diversity in people, places and situations, and how the few dictate to the many in every aspect of being. It still hangs on across the globe in this post-colonial and post-modern world governed by technological progress. Meanwhile, the rich tapestry of the natural world and its bountiful blessing are taken for granted, or placed in jeopardy, as man lives in a precarious balance fed by his self-indulgence.

People shape the problems and the opportunities of the world. People draw from the earth's bounty and suffer for denying its finite capacity.

Mega cities of glass and steel go up around the world every year, to house and succor expanding populations in a global economy fueled by never ending narcissistic consumption. If you freeze time, you might sense that we are at the edge of night on the brink of a nightmare, for all is not well with the state of the planet. The earth for the last several decades has been sending distress signals, which have much to do with human population growth, human economic expansionism, and diminishing ecosystems.


Numbing Numbers and their Haunting Questions

Reason No. 1: Are we running out of room?

Man is outgrowing the planet earth because of his predilections and perfidy.

· By 2040, thirty to forty percent of all species will be extinct or on the threshold of being extinct.

· One billion people on the planet now don't have access to safe drinking water.

· 2.6 billion people on the planet don't have access to an adequate sanitation system.

· By the year 2020, at the present rate, 130 million children younger than five will be undernourished with threatening health conditions.

How could this happen? How could our planet be faced with seemingly unprecedented challenges, challenges that might not be amenable to technological solutions? It was the reason I wrote Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? This is a book that explains in laymen's terms how man from the beginning, but more notably in the past 2,000 years, has "cut and controlled" his environment to the point of its present precarious condition.

In terms of population growth, it took from our prehistoric ancestors' time until 1800 to reach one billion people.

· By 1925, or 125 years later, we reached two billion people.

· By 1975, or 50 more years later, we reached four billion people.

· By 2000, or 25 more years later, we reached six billion people.

Incredibly, the world's population grew more in the past fifty years than in the previous four million years.

Today, 2005, the world's population is 6.5 billion people.

The world's population increases by 80 million people each year; 220,000 each day, 15,000 each hour.

The most notable population expansion in the world began after W.W.II.
The encouraging sign is that the world's population is estimated to grow to 9.5 billion by 2055, and then slowly fall from that point forward. Meanwhile, the challenge remains.

For example, women in Third World countries walk great distances daily to gather water from tainted ponds and streams, and search barren landscapes for fire wood for heating and cooking, while their men make a meager existence farming small plots of arid land.

It is in this climate where people suffer from extensive poverty and moral deprivation that radicals can stir them up to anger and violence, and even terrorism.

It is not difficult to imagine that after years of deprivation, poor sanitation, scarcity of drinking water, and generally degraded environmental conditions that the rage builds up, only taking a small spark to set the population on fire, leading to riots and worse.

It is so easy to forget in a rich country such as the United States that three-to-four billion people on this planet are desperately poor; that three billion people survive on less than $2 a day; and 1.5 billion survive on less than $1 a day (at the currency rate of 2005 dollars).

But the battleground for the planet's survival is not in these Third World countries. It is in the United States. Over the next fifty years because of immigration and low infant mortality rates, the US population is expected to top 420 million.

The implications are enormous:

1. Americans use a tremendous amount of energy, a tremendous amount of natural resources, much more than the average European or Japanese, for example.
2. The average American produces five times the amount of "green house gases" of any other country in the world.
3. Adding 150 million more Americans over the next fifty years, in terms of consumption, will add at least a factor or two to this amount.
4. Americans live in a high tech world of activities and factories requiring huge amounts of energy.
5. The lifestyle of Americans places 100 times the stress on the planet's environment and resources as those in the less developed world.

The question I ponder in Near Journey's End is: can the planet earth provide future generations with the basic necessities of life? The jury is still out. That is because China is now expanding at a colossal rate, imitating American hedonism with a concomitant commitment to technological progress.


Reason No. 2: Are we running out of water?

The most vital substance to sustaining life is potable water, yet 99 percent of the water that covers the earth is not available for human consumption. This gives pause as:

· 97 percent of the water of the earth is undrinkable seawater.
· 2 percent of the water of the earth is locked up in the polar ice cap.
· 1 percent of the water derived from rain and snow or banked in the earth's aquifers is the only source of our fresh water.

One of the ironies of nature is that 20 percent of the world's fresh water supply is located in the remote and sparsely populated Amazon basin of South America.

Meanwhile, many of our greatest rivers are threatened with running dry, among them are the Nile, the Colorado, the Mekong and Yellow River.

Incidentally, a watershed moment occurred in 2005, and that was for the first time the urban population of the globe exceeded the rural population. The world is committed to progress, which means moving toward technology, industrialization, and urbanization, and away from farming and a pastoral society. This is accepted without question, but it doesn't augur well for the planet.

People are abandoning their farms, selling them to urban developers to create factories and cities, and moving into these urban areas to often assume menial jobs, and encounter punishing poverty in make shift urban slums. These slums sit in the shadow of urban glass and steel skyscrapers. There is a sameness of this scenario about the globe.

· In 1950, there were 86 cities throughout the world with a population of 1 million.
· In 2005, there were more than 400.
· By 2015, there will be 600 cities throughout the world with a population of 1 million.

These numbers have incredible significance in terms of health problems, which is mainly a lack of potable drinking water and adequate sanitation.

I outline in Near Journey's End how public health was finally associated with these two factors in late eighteenth century England. Even today, with all of the scientific technology, three-to-five million people die every year from water related diseases, or 20,000 to 30,000 a day. The quality of water rightfully has become a major human rights issue.

In urban slums around the world, especially in Third World countries, with no sanitation systems, raw sewage is dumped into rivers. Haiti is one of the worst offenders as it is also one of the world's poorest countries. Gangs control the potable water supply and charge exorbitant rates for the water. It costs the average person a day's wages for a week's supply of water.

In one African community, the principal of an elementary school built a small dam with his own hands. It took him three years (1992-1995). The dam has created a reservoir designed to collect the spring water, and to allot it out to farmers of the region for irrigation. It has had miraculous results of bringing the vegetation alive.

In another success story, the governments of the United States and Mexico cooperated in creating the Falcon Dam across the Rio Grande River in 1955. This river is a pond compared to the Amazon, but essential to the region. The dam created a reservoir designed to support the water requirements for the region well into the twenty-first century. It has not succeeded. Near Journey's End illustrates how such "cut and control" solutions inevitably create new and more menacing problems.

For instance, in the last fifty years, or since the dam was built, new cities have sprung up on both sides of the border. Commerce has flourished. The population of the Falcon Dam region of the Rio Grande River basin has expanded from a population of 200,000 to 20 million with the demand for potable water increasing proportionately segueing to public health problems related to inadequate sanitation systems, and so on.

The increased water usage is etched in the stone markings aligning the Falcon Dam reservoir's banks. Each year a new water line indicates how the reservoir is shrinking in volume. First and foremost to suffer, however, are the local farmers. When they lose water for irrigation, it means acres of land no longer are available for farming.

Once the world's wetlands amounted to 12 percent of the world's land mass. Now half of the wetlands are gone, victims of rivers running dry due to excessive farming or human settlements. Gone are the breeding grounds for plants and animals. Gone are the ecosystems that cleanse the river waters. Gone are the woodlands that previously eased the burden of flooding by the retention of water.

Little more than a decade ago, however, the loss of the Mississippi River wetlands resulted in a catastrophic flood. A series of storms stalled over the upper Mississippi River basin for months on end. It seemed as if the rains would never stop. The actual amount of rainfall along the Mississippi hasn't changed for thousands of years. What has changed is the loss of more than 90 percent of the flood plain wetlands at the river's source. These wetlands once absorbed the seasonal high waters of the Mississippi keeping the river within its banks. Without the protection of the original wetlands ecosystem, and despite the valiant efforts of citizens along the river's banks to create temporary levies of sandbags, the river won, and cities and farms and factories for miles inland became submerged in its waters.

Another valuable source of fresh water is the aquifer system. It is a veritable underground river protected by limestone beds hundreds to thousands of feet below the surface. These hold 30 percent of the world's fresh water supply. Water tables are falling everywhere, and wells are going dry. Wells are the chief source of water in many Third World countries.

With gas prices rising, we worry about the depletion of oil reserves, but we pay little attention to the fact that we are losing our water reserves. We can live without oil. We cannot live without water.

The Great Plains of the United States are called "the breadbasket of the world" for the production of more than 30 percent of the world's grain. These plains are maintained by an elaborate irrigation system taken from the largest aquifer in the world. To produce this grain, it cuts drastically into our diminishing water supply. It is not an equal tradeoff. For example, the aquifer is reduced by 1.5 feet and replenished only by 0.5 inches in rainwater each year. Since 1955, or in the last 50 years, this aquifer has lost a third of its capacity. This has farmers worried.

Reason No. 3: Are we running out of food? Yes & No.

We have enough food but we do not have access to all the people that need food because of political strife, accessibility, and distribution problems, among others. Consequently, 800 million people throughout the world go hungry every day. In a desperate attempt to meet food requirements, many places over cultivate and over graze the land available. But, again, there is hope.

In 1965, more than 30 million died in China due to famine. The nightmare of extreme hunger in China today is long gone. China is booming. Along the Yangtze River Delta, for example, very few people go hungry as rich rice fields and diversified farms are flourishing. However, there is a cloud even to this positive picture. There is intense competition between factory developers and farmers for these rich lands, and farmers always lose. It is a matter of numbers.

· 1,000 tons of water can produce 1 ton of wheat worth $200.
· 1,000 tons of water can produce in industrial output worth $14,000, or 70 times as much.

If the goal is economic growth and jobs creation, which it is in most industrialized countries, making booming China no exception to this rule, you do not use a scarce water supply to produce wheat at the expense of this goal.

Farmlands are turned into giant industrial complexes, where instead of producing 3 tons of rice per year, a factory may yield a harvest of 120,000 pairs of jeans, ready for affluent American and European consumers for the product.

It is an oft-repeated situation from the dawn of industrialization, what I call in Near Journey's End the "cut and control" philosophy of a capitalistic culture. Something desired is gained at the expense of something lost, which can never be recovered again.

Tens of thousands of skilled farmers are rushing into newly created urban communities where the factories are located. They are programmed to do menial repetitive work and become part of the giant industrial machine losing their connection to the land and with nature. Sociologists long ago invented the term alienation and self-estrangement. It has been part of the Western psyche for more than 100 years. Now, Asia is creating its own version of the malady.

Reason No. 4: Is Global Warming Real?

Near Journey's End focuses on another set of numbers, the so-called problem of global warming creeping up on us in the West. A few years ago, Chicago experienced a ten-day heat wave in which the temperature never dipped below 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It took the life of 750 people.

Heat waves in Paris, London, Calcutta, and Melbourne have over the past several years taken the lives of tens of thousands of citizens.

Many are skeptical of global warming even though they acknowledge the carbon dioxide levels of pollution are on the rise. Scientists contend these elevated carbon dioxide levels are the cause of the temperature increases and contributory to static periods of high temperatures in some regions. In the arctic region, scientists claim there are 20 major glaciers compared to 500 in 1855 or 150 years ago. They see an increase in the temperature of the region of 2 to 3 degrees. This has had severe effects on the animals and habitation of the region.

Closer to home, the Louisiana Coastal Marshlands and Wetlands are experiencing drastic changes. It has become the breeding ground for new species of birds, animals, and insects. The rise in the water level of these marshlands has reduced the Louisiana coastline by 25 square miles. They have disappeared into the Gulf of Mexico. Where once stood giant oaks on this delta land nourished by fresh water, they now stand as naked tree stump sculptures in salt water.

Glaciers are melting, sea levels rising, periodic heat waves punctuate summers, and this seems only the beginning of its early warning signals.

Man's ingenuity is being tested. He dabbles with solutions such as the use of wind power in Southern California, solar panels in many parts of the country, while Detroit flirts with fuel-efficient hybrid automobiles. Will this be enough? The answering is a resounding "no!"

The state of the world is precarious. What happens elsewhere should concern us, but it hasn't, not yet anyway.

We hear of climate change, water scarcity, land degradation, the loss of energy, and the depletion of natural resources. The UN Report on Global Warming states that the last place that will feel the influence; the last continent that will suffer the least and suffer last is North America. That means us.

Two enormous bodies of water, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, protect the United States and Canada and the currents are favorable to both countries. So, while the rest of the world is choking in its gases, many produced by the US, or are dying from heat, we'll be able to go on the same as ever. We think.

That is why it is difficult to get the attention of Americans and why I wrote Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?

The planet is in a precarious balance, but not yet doomed. It is not yet headed for disaster. It can reverse the trend and Americans could show the way. A writer can do only so much.

One person wrote after reading one of my articles on the subject: “Give it a rest! Nobody's listening,” he advised, “ nobody cares!” Another person wrote, "Something must have spurred you to dump on us.” Could it be a case of "kill the messenger” to deny the message?

This book is meant to provide a perspective and to stimulate the reader to read further and reflect seriously on the information provided for the problem is not going to go away. For example, 1,360 scientists from 95 countries have compiled a report recently that warns that two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on this planet is being degraded by human pressure.

People need food, fresh water, timber, fiber, and fuel to live. Getting these for six and one-half billion people is putting a serious strain on the natural environment. Since more than half of the people on earth now live in cities, and not in the country, it is hard for them to connect to the natural world.

It is not technology or industry or political rhetoric or ecclesiastical pontification that sustains life on this planet but nature, but ordinary people. Every girl and boy who has had the privilege to grow up in a rural community knows this. Every young person who has hunted with their father knows, too, that a given amount of land will only support so many white-tailed deer. If the deer population increases, malnutrition and disease will thin the herd. A pond that can handle the waste of 30 ducks will die from loss of oxygen if 1,000 ducks inhabit the pond.

The American population is expected to increase 150 million over the next fifty years, due largely to immigration and low mortality rates. This will put increased pressure on the environment, the economy, and on the individual as his spatial world is radically reduced.

Laboratory experiments have shown that rats reduced in spatial comfort attack and kill each other. We have already observed this in our metropolitan areas, as they have become killing zones. What will they be like when we go from 370 million to 520 million?

As vital resources dwindle, there is no doubt there will be wars for control of what remains -- food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. Why do we not try to understand the motivation of terrorists? Can we not see the relevance of this unfolding catastrophe in the making?

If the world continues to rely on force rather than cooperation, our children and grandchildren can expect an even more violent future to look forward to than we experienced in the last century, which was the bloodiest in man's history.

Are we running out of answers?

Often, I am reminded how indebted I should be to technology. Some suggest that I should lower the heat on my criticism of science and technology.

My problem is that I don't believe we live in Camelot; nor do I believe that technology is the Merlin of panaceas for solving our political, economic, social, and industrial problems. Technologists may infer they can wave Merlin's magic wand and our problems are solved, but we know otherwise.

We are committed to treating symptoms rather than causes. Public health and social education are the better routes to curing AIDS than drugs. The same goes for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, on and on and on. It is lifestyle, stupid! And nobody wants to change lifestyles. We want to “cut and control” without consequences or regrets, but alas, that is not possible.

We seal the Mexican border instead of solving the problem of why tens of thousands of Mexicans and other nationals put their lives in jeopardy to come to this country. We want to kill terrorists instead of solving the political problems that cause terrorism.

· Defining problems takes time, patience, and persistence. Treating symptoms is expedient. We like to solve problems by force or intimidation or fear rather than through the engaging process of understanding, negotiation, compromise, and cooperation.

· We want compliance, which is always coercive, rather than cooperation, which is always voluntary. Voluntarism takes trust, which demands time and understanding. Coercion is husband by fear and puts people on automatic pilot.

The arctic region is turning into a toxic sink, according to researchers. All the chemicals that Rachel Carson complained about more than forty years ago are killing the region: DDI, PCB, dioxins, and mercury.

It spreads through the food chain. First the fish are poisoned, then the marine mammals that feed on the fish, and then land animals such as caribou. Now, you ask, how do these chemicals kill caribou? Scientists call it "the grasshopper effect." Chemical pollutants are released into the environment and carried thousands of miles south, and evaporate in the warm southern climate, ride the winds back to the frigid arctic where they eventually fall to earth in poisoned rain. The caribou feed upon the tainted moss and grass of the tundra, fish feed upon the tainted plankton, which then are eaten by seals and polar bears. In fact polar bears are showing up with levels of pollutants, which would qualify them to be buried in hazardous waste dumps.

Enter the Inuits, indigenous people to the arctic region who came over from the orient some 4,000 years ago. Seals provide 65 percent of their protein diet. The sea is the greatest source of sustenance. The seal and the sea are integral to their culture, spiritually, emotionally, and biologically. The Inuits live today much as generations past with one exception. They are dying, and infant mortality rates and birth defect levels are increasing. Why?

The answers are found in industrial and technological progress. Industrial pollutants from the United States, Central America, and China find their way into this arctic seafood chain. Inuit mothers don't have access to formula milk for their babies but must breast feed. Their breast milk is full of pollutants. As a consequence, these babies are showing levels of pollutants the worst on the planet.

The arctic is the early warning system for the rest of the planet. Inuits have contributed nothing to their contamination and are the innocent victims to industrial pollution, which carries the name, "progress." The only hope is that industrial countries to the south and west find the will as well as the way to halt the production of these pollutants. Not an easy task.

In Tijuana, Mexico, not far from the border of the United States, there is a tariff free trade zone. More than 300 companies from several nations operate in this zone, and provide the jobs for 140,000 people from Tijuana and the surrounding area. The paradox here is that these workers are producing pollutants that threaten their lives and the lives of their children.

For example, as this is being written, there is an abandon battery company there. It was ordered to clean up its industrial waste at a cost of more than $6 million. Instead, it decided to leave without securing the waste. Left behind were 40 million pounds of toxic wastes in drums rusting from rainfall and baking in the sun. Drums leaked into streams, seeped into the soil and into artesian wells. Fumes have also polluted the air for more than a decade, yet nothing has been done.

A community below this abandoned plant, largely a shantytown of 10,000 workers and their families suffers mightily. Every time it rains a nearby stream overflows into a creek that provides water for washing and bathing. It is full of lead oxide, sulfites, sulfuric acid, and arsenic. As this highly contaminated waterway weaves its way through the shantytown, everyone and everything in its path is put in peril. Over 90 percent of the children tested showed elevated levels of lead in their blood, and an inordinate number of children suffer from birth defects. For years, this small community petitioned the government to clean up the site, and each time the petitioners were turned down.

What is worse, these children are innocent victims. Less than a mile from the United States, these petitioners have no law on their side, as this free trade zone is not subject to compliance with environmental laws. The parents laboring in these factories for $15 for ten-hour days have become reluctantly complicit with their employers in this tragedy. They have no sense of communal power.

This is not the case in Barrio Logan, a small ethnic community in San Diego.
For forty years, this community saw the region turned into a junkyard sprinkled with industrial factories. People complained but nothing happened.

Instead, the city fathers cut Barrio Logan off from the rest of San Diego by choosing to build a bridge and an elaborate highway system across its boundaries. Once again the neighborhood was under attack. Each day, hundreds of diesel trucks and tens of thousands of automobiles filled their breathing air with toxic emissions. Next, scores of new industrial plants sprung up around their perimeter further assaulting the air, land, and water with toxins.

In a minor protest, Barrio Logan community leaders asked the city fathers to build a park under the bridge. The city fathers promised, and then reneged on the promise citing expediencies. The people rebelled. They formed a human chain around the perimeter of the “would be” site for the park, and drew media attention. The city gave them their park. Chicano Park became a rallying cry for people of Barrio Logan. Local artists painted the pylons with ethnic art in celebration of their culture.

Studies have shown that communities of color, or at the lower end of the economic food chain are more likely to be exploited with little recourse as opposed to other more affluent areas. More than 20 percent of Barrio Logan residents, for example, because of this inclination, have asthma or asthmatic symptoms.

After the success of establishing Chicano Park, now with a sense of communal power, residents took on Master Plating, a factory in the heart of Barrio Logan that used and dumped hexavalent chromium into the ground. This chemical is a known cancer-causing toxin. Local television got involved and the plant was shut down. Levels of hexavalent chromium were reduced by 75 percent, another small victory for the people united as community.

Palm Springs, California is a sparkling clean upwardly mobile society of
40,000. Not far away, however, is a harbinger of possible things to come in the
Salton Sea. This is the largest internal body of water in California, and a sanctuary for half the species of birds in the United States as they migrate with the seasons in this part of the country. One hundred years ago this was all desert. But in 1905, a violent winter storm caused the Colorado River to go on a rampage. The river jumped its banks and surged into the basin, forming the Salton Sea.

During the hottest four months of the year, the Salton Sea loses six feet of its water level due to evaporation with temperatures above 100 degrees. Today, It provides a 500,000-acre carpet of irrigated farmland producing 85 percent of winter vegetable crops for the United States. Now we come to the mixed blessing.

The Imperial Valley produces a million acre feed, which runs into the Salton
Sea, and there is no way for the water to run off. This keeps it from drying up, but it also feeds it with salt and chemicals that are killing it. Over the years, this has resulted in the Salton Sea being 25 percent saltier than the ocean.

In the 1980s, the contribution of botulism and algae bloom here killed millions of fish. Then the birds that rested from their long flights in this sanctuary began to die. In a three-month period, conservationists counted 150,000 waterfowl birds dead from eating tainted fish. This frightened the public. Fear won out.

Once thriving motels, restaurants, resorts, and parks in the area since the 1960s were suddenly abandoned. The rusting, fraying, and naked sculptures of the past now pencil the landscape. Meanwhile, farmers agreed to sell off two million gallons originally directed to the Salton Sea to San Diego County at the expense of the Salton Sea. Scientists warn that if the Salton Sea gets any saltier or loses any more volume everything will die. Farmers considered the needs of developers in the city as precedence over saving it.

So, the Salton Sea remains trapped between the conflicting self-interests of farmers and developers. It may be an omen of things to come, as the next little story attests.

Some forty years ago Samarkand in Uzbekistan was a thriving, ancient city, the silk route 2,500 years ago from the orient to Rome, where an exchange of ideas and cultures accompanied its products. Today, Samarkand still has the cultural architecture and scholarship of its illustrious past preserved in its medieval section. A few miles to the west, the once bountiful lower end of Uzbekistan's greatest river, the Amu Darya, has been literally sucked dry. It no longer connects to the Aural Sea, the world's fourth largest internal body of water.

The river basin is littered with abandoned irrigation pump stations and lines, the skeletal hulls of abandoned boats, dried up ponds, and ghost towns. The Aural Sea has shrunk to half its size in the last thirty years for its failure to connect with this river. This is all the result of a misguided Soviet Union agricultural policy.

In the 1960s, Russia made Uzbekistan a cotton producing country, second largest in the world, by restructuring 100,000 square miles of desert into irrigated farmland. It did this by redirecting water from the lower Amu Darya into canals, then into irrigating ditches filled with pesticides and fertilizers to cotton producing fields along its flanks.

To give a sense of this disaster, the Amu Darya River in this area once was so wide that it took Alexander the Great and his army five days to cross it. Over the span of the past 30 years, the Amu Darya no longer connects with its source, the Aural Sea, ninety miles away, and has been reduced to a dry wasteland.

This has been called the greatest ecological disaster of the planet. It could happen to the Salton Sea as its fragile ecosystem is at the mercy of farmers and developers who would prefer to use the Colorado River to provide drinking water to San Diego and irrigation for farmland.

There are no easy answers. Meanwhile, hundreds of species of birds and fish are disappearing, communities are being contaminated, people, plants and animals are dying, and the policy seems to be "ready, fire, aim." No matter what the community, the country, nor what the political, social, or cultural orientation, there is no wisdom in pointing fingers. That is why I ask the question, which cries out to be asked in search of an answer:

Can the planet earth survive self-indulgent man?

Note: This is the introductory piece to Dr. Fisher’s new book, Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? For more information, check out his website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com, and peripateticphilospher.blogspot.com.