Environment, Sustainability and Health

My Insights: From the reading, I learned about the unique relationship between... environmental pitfalls and poverty. I never really considered povery a link to environmental problems, but after the reading I do see a connection.

"Many environmental problems stem from poverty—often contributing to a downward spiral in which poverty exacerbates environmental degradation and environmental degradation exacerbates poverty. In poor rural areas, for example, there are close links among high infant mortality, high fertility, high population growth and extensive deforestation, as peasants fell tropical forests for firewood and new farmland..." - United Nations Development Programme (2003). Chapter 6 - Public Policies to Ensure Environmental Sustainability. Human Development Report 2003. Oxford University Press.

Graphical Image: Global warming is causing deserts to become drier which causes drought and famine (called desertification - like the Sahara in Africa); and ocean temperatures to raise and become warmer which will cause violent weather patterns like flooding, hurricanes and tornadoes (as in the Atlantic Ocean) .

Two Contrasting Unique Quotes on global warming that unfortunately have divided the people of United States:
"Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming."
AL GORE, speech at National Sierra Club Convention, Sept. 9, 2005

“...we have an environmental movement that is run by people who want to fight, not to win.”
Dr Patrick Moore, founder member of Greenpeace,writing in the Mail on Sunday, May 2000