24 billion tons of topsoil from cropland are being lost every year. The nuclear disaster of Chernobyl 1986, which in varying degrees has subjected over 35 million people to radioactive assaults, was only one of more than a hundred nuclear accidents which took place over the last decade. 70 percent of the world's population lives within 100 miles of the sea. The profligate use of fossil fuels by the industrialized world is rapidly and irreversibly changing our climate. Experts stressed that continued rising sea levels and global warming will lead to massive flooding of coastal areas, creating millions of new environmental refugees on an even greater scale than we witness annually in countries like Bangladesh.
Human survival depends on biological diversity.
At current rates of environmental destruction, especially the wanton destruction of tropical forests in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, we will lose at least a million species within the next ten years and a quarter of all living species within the next fifty years. We the participants of the Morelia Symposium urge the leaders of the world at the Earth Summit to be held in June 1992 in Brazil to commit themselves to ending ecocide and ethnocide, and we propose the creation of an International Court of the Environment modeled on the International Court of Justice at The Hague. 20 percent of the world's population consumes 80 percent of its wealth and is responsible for 75 percent of its pollution. We believe there is sufficient knowledge and technology available to reduce the obscene disparity of wealth. We demand a genuine transfer of knowledge and resources from North to South, not the dumping of obsolescent and inefficient technologies and products.