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Lester Brown, in his 1998 State of the World report on progress toward a sustainable society (W. W. Norton & Co., New York), noted the urgency with which we are confronted with environmental degradation and of the widespread failure to summon the political will needed to solve these problems. Most of us have been aware of the plume of smoke that spread across Southeast Asia during the summer and winter of 1997, turning the skies dark on an area larger than the continental United States. This disaster has left at least 20 million people choking on air that has become a toxic soup, and has killed hundreds outright. The areas affected include Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam. More recently, citizens of the Gulf Coast states and Great Plains region have been exposed to varying degrees of toxic smoke-filled air emanating from the Southern Mexico-Guatemala region, where thousands of acres of forests are burning out of control. The state of Texas has had to declare an air quality emergency, while warning children and older people to stay inside, and for all people to limit any outside exercise. In Mexico itself, scores of people have died and at least 50 million have been left choking in smoke from nearly 10,000 fires. A cloud of haze and cinders has hung over most of southern Mexico and much of Central America since early April,1998. Airports have been closed in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and almost all flights in and out of the region have been canceled (The New York Times, Monday, May 18, 1998, p. A10). Through these ecological disasters, Brown reminds us of the interconnected dangers we face. Because of El Nino and our growing vulnerability to climatic extremes, the slash and burn practiced by many farmers, as well as the annual burning practiced by many loggers, have the opportunity to get out of control, as we now see in Southeast Asia and Middle America. Chapter 14 investigates these and other resource issues, such as:
Your text emphasizes that nowhere is the globalization trend more pronounced than in the study of resources. Therefore, among many questions we explore in Chapter 14, we look first at where resources are distributed, and why problems arise from uneven distribution of resources.
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