Since the first Earth Day, our global vehicle population has swelled from 246 million to 730 million. Air traffic has gone up by a factor of six. We coax from the soil, with the help of strange chemicals, 2.25 times as much wheat, 2.5 times as much corn, 2.2 times as much rice, almost twice as much sugar, and almost four times as many soybeans as we did 30 years ago. We pull from the oceans almost twice as much fish. With the fish, we can see clearly how the planet behaves, when we push it too far.
Fish become harder and harder to find.
If they are caught before they're old enough to reproduce, if their nursery habitat is destroyed, if we scoop up not only the cod, but the capelin upon which the cod feeds, the fish may never come back. The Earth does not care that we didn't mean it, that we promise not to do it again, that we make nice gestures every Earth Day. We have among us die-hard optimists who will berate me for not reporting the good news since the last Earth Day. There is plenty of it, but it is mostly measured in human terms, not Earth terms. Average human life expectancy has risen since 1970 from 58 to 66 years.