How to Enable Planet Sustainability

About the Book

Planet Earth will remain habitable only if it soon makes fundamental changes in management of its nine basic natural resources. One of these—the atmosphere—contains carbon dioxide equivalents which are causing global warming and other weather disturbances. People have the opportunity to keep global warming within two degrees Celsius of its level before the industrial revolution. The humanity resource, now seven billion persons, can be kept within a ten-billion limit only with wider distribution of wanted contraceptives and elimination of poverty, promoting many children to care for elders. Survival may depend on eliminating all nuclear weapons. The energy resource must transform so that two-thirds of consumption of fossil fuels are replaced by solar and wind power, and the other third of fossil-fuel emissions are buried in subterranean rocks as gas or carbonate minerals. The forest resource is a major sink for carbon dioxide. High-income countries historically cut a billion hectares of forest to raise food and should now offer funds to forested countries to avoid or postpone such tree cutting. The fresh water resource is available to 89 percent of humanity and should soon be increased close to 100 percent. Limiting temperature rise will also reduce glacier melting and control sea-level rising. The ocean resource can be preserved partly by increasing the areas of regulated fishing. The land resource can be enhanced by greater aquaculture fisheries and by avoiding “land grabs” containing indigenous peoples. Mineral extraction is slowed by recycling. The biodiversity resource can be protected by additional animal reserves and eliminating poachers.

About the Author

Allan Matthews, the author, attended Carleton College, Antioch College, and Johns Hopkins University, majoring in geology. He was editor of Minerals Yearbook and uranium specialist at the US Department of the Interior. He was a full-time geology advisor in President Truman’s Materials Policy Commission and President Carter’s Global 2000 Report. As program officer in the US Agency for International Development, he worked overseas in Germany, Liberia, and Yemen and as desk officer in the District of Columbia for Ethiopia and Ghana. His public service aimed to promote a federation of democracies and an initiative and referendum procedure in the US federal government.