Elephants in the room

BookProject works to raise awareness of the challenges of creating peace, creating a parity of social wealth, and sustaining life on our planet. When the world is viewed in the context of these challenges, it becomes difficult to ignore certain elephants in the room.

This page presents a number of issues that, despite their obvious, profound, and universal importance, are rarely brought into focus by the mainstream media.

Peace

• "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."
  - Albert Einstein
• The United States devotes most of its federal discretionary budget to preparing for war. (See graph below.)
• "Since the end of the Cold War [the US has] committed as a matter of policy to maintaining military capabilities far in excess of those of any would-be adversary or combination of adversaries." (more...)
  - Andrew J. Bacevich, The Normalization of War

• National Priorities Project
• The New American Militarism, Andrew Bacevich

Graph courtesy of the National Priorities Project

Global warming

• "If further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 80 feet higher than today." (more...)
  - James E. Hansen, lead climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science
• Temperature increases can reduce or even halt photosynthesis in crops. Each 1-degree-Celsius increase in temperature above the norm causes approximately a 10% drop in yield for wheat and rice crops, and a 17% drop in yield for corn and soybean crops.
  - paraphrased from Plan B 2.0 by Lester R. Brown

• Plan B 2.0, Lester R. Brown | Earth Policy Institute
• Natural Resources Defense Council
• Union of Concerned Scientists

Sustainability

• "Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.3 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and four months to regenerate what we use in a year... Turning resources into waste faster than waste can be turned back into resources puts us in global ecological overshoot, depleting the very resources on which human life and biodiversity depend." (more...)
  - Global Footprint Network
• "During the past 40 years nearly one-third of the world's cropland (1.5 billion hectares) has been abandoned because of soil erosion and degradation. About 2 million hectares of rainfed and irrigated agricultural lands are lost to production every year due to severe land degradation, among other factors. It takes approximately 500 years to replace 25 millimeters (1 inch) of topsoil lost to erosion. The minimal soil depth for agricultural production is 150 millimeters. From this perspective, productive fertile soil is a nonrenewable, endangered ecosystem." (see graphs...)
  - paraphrased from The Global Education Project website
• "An international group of ecologists and economists warned [in November, 2006] that the world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates, based on a four-year study of catch data and the effects of fisheries collapses... The paper, published in the journal Science, concludes that overfishing, pollution and other environmental factors are wiping out important species around the globe, hampering the ocean's ability to produce seafood, filter nutrients and resist the spread of disease." (more...)

• Global Footprint Network
• The Global Education Project

Habitat

• "In a study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in collaboration with Commonweal, researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals. Tests revealed a total of 287 chemicals in the group... Of the 287 chemicals we detected in umbilical cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests. The dangers of pre- or post-natal exposure to this complex mixture of carcinogens, developmental toxins and neurotoxins have never been studied." (more...)
  - Environmental Working Group, Body Burden — The Pollution in Newborns
• "A U.K. research team reports a surprising rise in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and in motor neuron disease broadly in 10 industrial countries—six in Europe plus the United States, Japan, Canada, and Australia... Over an 18-year period, death rates from these dementias, mainly Alzheimer's, more than tripled for men and nearly doubled for women. This increase in dementia is linked to a rise in the concentration of pesticides, industrial effluents, car exhaust, and other pollutants in the environment."
  - Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0
• In a recent review study published in The Lancet, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine "found that 202 industrial chemicals have the capacity to damage the human brain, and they conclude that chemical pollution may have harmed the brains of millions of children worldwide. The authors conclude further that the toxic effects of industrial chemicals on children have generally been overlooked... To protect children against industrial chemicals that can injure the developing brain, the researchers urge a precautionary approach for chemical testing and control. Such an approach is beginning to be applied in the European Union... At present in the U.S., requirements for toxicity testing of chemicals are minimal." (more...)

• Environmental Working Group
• Plan B 2.0, Lester R. Brown | Earth Policy Institute

Inequality

• The concentration of wealth in the US, as measured by the share of the nation's income going to the top 5% of the population, is higher in our era than it has been at any point in US history since the 1920s.
  - paraphrased from All Together Now by Jared Bernstein
• "The social and economic gap between the world's richest 1 billion people and its poorest 1 billion has no historical precedent. Not only is this gap wide, it is widening. The poorest billion are trapped at a subsistence level and the richest billion are becoming wealthier with each passing year. The economic gap can be seen in the contrasts in nutrition, education, disease patterns, family size, and life expectancy."
  - Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0
• "The 20% of the global population living in rich countries consumes 86% of the world's resources."
  - James Bruges, The Little Earth Book

• All Together Now, Jared Bernstein
• Plan B 2.0, Lester R. Brown | Earth Policy Institute
• The Little Earth Book, James Bruges

Corporate control of government

• "The revolving door [the frequent appointment of corporate executives and lobbyists to public posts and the movement of government officials into lucrative jobs in the private sector] is bleeding the federal government. It biases the performance of public officials, whose eyes are cast toward future employment. It wastes large sums of taxpayer dollars. It stifles competition. It puts public health and safety and the environment at risk. And ultimately, it erodes public support and confidence in government — which beggars all of us." (more...)
  - Joan Claybrook, President, Public Citizen
• "The result [of globalization] is a system, subsidized and abetted by governments, that hands power to a handful of translational corporations, turning the world into a playground for those who can move capital and projects quickly from place to place. It is the dubious idea that business can make everyone better off by roaming from country to country with no restrictions — in search of the lowest wages, the loosest environmental regulations, the most docile and desperate workers. This is a world of nomadic capital that never sets down roots, never builds communities, and leaves little behind but toxic waste and embittered workers."
  - David Boyle, The Little Money Book

• Public Citizen
• Center for Public Integrity
• The Little Money Book, David Boyle

The media

• "A handful of media companies dominate what you watch on television. As their influence spreads to other outlets, the diversity of what you see diminishes. Five media conglomerates — Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, News Corp. and NBC/GE — control the big four networks (70 percent of the primetime television market share), most cable channels, as well as vast holdings in radio, publishing, movie studios, music, Internet and other sectors." (more...) (ownership charts)
  - StopBigMedia.com, Costs of Consolidation
• "By providing slick press releases, paid-for 'experts,' ostensibly neutral but actually bogus citizen groups, and canned news events, crafty PR agents can shape the news to suit their mostly corporate clientele. Powerful corporate interests, wary of government regulation, spend a fortune to ensure that their version of science gets a wide play in the news as objective truth. Media owners welcome PR because it provides, in effect, a subsidy for them by offering filler at no cost. Surveys show that PR accounts for anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of what appears as news."
  - Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media

• StopBigMedia.com
• The Problem of the Media, Robert W. McChesney | book website
• Free Press
• The Real News