Alternate Vision

I am a sucker for documentary films. By chance, I stumbled upon Journey to Planet Earth on PBS, narrated by Matt Damon. This is the sort of thing that everyone needs to watch, whether you are a CEO, politician or the world's biggest rockstar.

At the rate we (human race) are going, there is a chance that half the world's wildlife will become extinct within half a century or more, probably by the time we (my generation) become grandparents. The decisions we make in the next few years will be critical in determining whether or not we can avoid "the sixth great extinction of the world's animals."

"Loss of farmland to urban development, the pollution of the Earth’s rivers, inadequate housing and water resources for those living in the world’s mega-cities — these are just some of the topics covered in Journey to Planet Earth."

Brazil and China
China, unable to cultivate enough farmland to feed its population, recently overtook Japan as the world's largest importer of meats. As China rapidly loses cropland, Brazil is gaining it at a dangerously fast rate making it one of the world's largest food exporters. Brazil is one of the only countries that has a vast land area that can potentially be cropped. Economic and political pressures forcing Brazil to increase its cultivated land area are growing stronger.

This pressure only means that environmentalists worst fears could be realized. "In our increasingly integrated world, the fate of both Brazil's Amazon basin and the cerrado - a savannah like region the size of Europe on the basin's southern edge - can no longer be seperated from the family planning decisions of hundreds of millions of couples outside of Brazil and the aspirations for a better diet of billions more." - Earth Policy (Brazilian Dilemma)