TOWN HALL JOURNAL - SPRING 2007
The Crisis of Resource Exhaustion and the ‘Three Cs’ Solution
Carter Roberts, Chief Executive Officer of World Wildlife Fund USA, told a Town Hall audience that the depletion of Earth’s natural resources poses a more immediate danger to human beings than global warming. He spoke on December 7, 2006 at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica.
Roberts began his Town Hall address by stressing the dire manifestations of global warming. “Anyone paying attention to the best available science these days should be horrified if not panicked,” he declared. “Melting ice caps, hottest years on record, disappearing arable lands throughout the world, disappearing coral reefs, disappearing forests -- we’re losing an acre of forest per second, 40 million acres a year. Extinction rates are 100 to 1000 times what they were before the Industrial Age. Much of this is irreversible.”
Roberts insisted, however, that he considers “resource exhaustion” to be a more immediate threat. “We know that climate change will threaten life as we know it over the coming centuries, but resource exhaustion threatens the lives and livelihoods of people around the Earth right now,” he claimed.
“The world and its resources are in danger,” Roberts said, “…and when natural resources start disappearing the results are predictable: extinction, poverty, hunger, instability and violence.”
Roberts explained that resource exhaustion affects everyone in the world, citing an article in the journal Science that predicted a collapse of the planet’s major fisheries by the year 2048. “Your grandchildren may not know what a tuna fish sandwich tastes like,” Roberts maintained.
Though he enumerated the dangers and costs of resource exhaustion, Roberts also gave Town Hall members and guests cause for optimism, specifying three “guiding principles” World Wildlife Fund is pursuing in order to diminish or even reverse the impact of resource depletion: conservation, corporations, and communities.
“First, conservation must focus on people and their livelihoods as much as it focuses on creatures,” Roberts stressed. “Second, global corporations, particularly those that depend on natural resources, have to take the lead in conserving them. Third, if we’re going to succeed, we’re going to need to make decisions between global communities and these massive global forces that are changing the Earth.
“I have every reason in the world to be optimistic,” Roberts concluded. “These are huge challenges...and yet when I look at examples around the world…I really do believe we have a chance, a chance to save nature and in doing so to save ourselves.”
