Watching the World
A “Great Dying”
Millions of species of plants and animals exist today. Scientists once estimated that throughout the history of life on earth, species have become extinct (because of disease, lack of food, and failure to adapt) at a rate of less than ten per year. Now, according to the UN Department of Public Information, scientists believe the rate is hundreds, perhaps thousands of times higher. In 1970 it was estimated that one species became extinct each day. By 1990 the rate had risen to one per hour. By 1992 a species was vanishing every 12 minutes. The primary cause for extinction is the disappearance of natural habitats through deforestation, urban expansion, rural development, and pollution of air and water. Many environmentalists are saying that the planet is in the midst of a “great dying.” Says Dr. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program: “If Charles Darwin were alive today, his work would most likely focus not on the origins but rather on the obituaries of species.”
Foreign Aid —Who Gets What?
Does foreign aid do much to benefit the poor? According to the UN Human Development Report 1992, only 27 percent of foreign aid goes to the ten countries that have 72 percent of the world’s poorest people. The richest 40 percent of the population of the developing world gets more than twice the aid given to the poorest 40 percent. South Asian nations, home to almost half of the world’s poorest people, receive $5 per person in aid. Middle Eastern countries, with three times South Asia’s per capita income, receive $55 per person. The report adds that nations that spend heavily on arms receive twice as much aid per capita as do countries that spend more moderately. The lowest share of the funds (about 7 percent of bilateral aid and 10 percent of multilateral aid) is all that goes for basic human needs—education, health care, safe drinking water, sanitation, family planning, and nutrition programs.
Potential Nuclear Nightmare
“The West’s attempt to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons has failed,” states U.S.News & World Report, “and a new and much more dangerous era of nuclear proliferation has begun.” Now the choice they face is either to use force to prevent new nations from going nuclear or to “learn to live in a world in which nearly every nation that wants nuclear weapons has them.” What has led to this state of affairs? “Things that were very difficult for the smartest people in 1943 are easy for ordinary people now,” says physicist and former nuclear-weapons designer Richard Garwin. Mathematical problems that challenged the best minds then can now be solved on a personal computer. In addition it has become increasingly easy for a determined nation to gain access to the critical technologies needed for producing a bomb. In an effort to stem the tide, 27 nations signed an accord in April that limits the sale of material or machinery that can be used for making atom bombs. However, significant gaps exist, as a number of nations with nuclear capability or seeking to get it were not included.
Australia’s “Pill-Popping” Society
An Australian National Health Survey has come up with some alarming results. The study revealed that 1 in every 50 Australians uses tranquilizers every day. Another three quarter million admitted to having taken drugs such as Valium and Serepax some time in the two weeks preceding the survey. According to The Sun-Herald newspaper of Sydney, the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre claims that close to ten million prescriptions for benzodiazepines are written every year and that they are the most widely prescribed medicines in Western countries. A researcher at the center said that many people taking this type of drug regularly may not even realize they are actually drug dependent.
New African Plague
“The narcotics business has become one of the most serious threats to the stability and economic development of the [African] continent.” So states Dr. Simon Baynham of the Africa Institute of South Africa, writing in The Star of Johannesburg. The drug trade has increased dramatically in Africa over the last decade, as it is geographically well situated for shipments from Colombia and Asia. “By 1990, one third of the heroin intercepted in Europe had been transited by way of Africa,” says Baynham. He notes that there is also growing cooperation between the international drug trade and terrorist organizations. Dr. Baynham refers to the drug trade in Africa as a potential “new epidemic of momentous proportions” that “will be added to Africa’s woes of war, famine and AIDS.”
Surplus Milk Dumped
In spite of severe food shortages, millions of quarts [liters] of milk have been dumped by South African dairies over the last five years. The dairies are charged a levy by the Dairy Board, which should have made provision to distribute the surplus milk. But since it had not done so, an executive of the National Milk Distributors Association said: “What can we do? We have to dump it. It makes no economic sense to undermine our own markets by giving it away or paying to have it taken away.” On the other hand, other institutions have deplored the waste. The Council for the Aged states that milk is dumped “at a time when millions of elderly South Africans are struggling to buy the bare means to survive.”
Long-Lived Japanese
The Japanese have a greater life expectancy than any other nation on earth, according to the latest statistics of the World Health Organization. The average life expectancy for women in Japan is 82.5 years, while that for men is 76.2 years. The second highest life expectancy for women, 81.5 years, is in France, followed closely by Switzerland at 81.0 years. Second place for men is in Iceland, at 75.4 years, followed by Greece at 74.3 years. The 350-page statistical yearbook also supplied other interesting facts. The world’s highest fertility rate is that of Rwanda, where each woman has an average of 8.3 children. The suicide rate is lowest in the Bahamas, with 1.3 for every 100,000 people, while Hungary has the highest suicide rate, at 38.2 per 100,000. And the highest rate of automobile-accident deaths is in the small South American nation of Suriname, at 33.5 per 100,000. The lowest? Malta, with only 1.6 fatal auto accidents for every 100,000 people.
Painful Music
“Turn that music down!” has long been the cry of irritated parents. Many teenagers feel they cannot enjoy their music unless they feel its beat. While loud music has frequently been linked to hearing loss, a recent report in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Canada, explained that tinnitus is also a common result. Tinnitus is “a ringing, rushing, buzzing, popping or hissing inside the head, usually affecting both ears. But that [description] doesn’t do the sound justice,” the paper states. Once you get it, “you never have perfect peace and quiet [again],” says Elizabeth Eayrs, coordinator of the Tinnitus Association of Canada. Especially affected are headphone wearers who crank the volume up so loud that others can hear it. Their ability to enjoy music or any other sound in their later years is often seriously impaired.
Pope Apologizes
Pope John Paul II has apologized twice to the African continent for the slave trade. The first time was in February, during the pope’s trip to Senegal. At that time the Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported that the pope implored “‘the forgiveness of heaven’ and the forgiveness of Africa for the historic crime of slavery with which even Christians . . . were spotted.” The second apology, about three months later, was given during his visit to São Tomé. At the Vatican, the pope explained that “since the church is a community made up of sinners too, over the centuries there have been transgressions of the precept of love. . . . They were failings on the part of individuals and groups that adorned themselves with the name of Christians.” Commenting on the “papal apologies,” the daily newspaper La Repubblica said that the pope “spoke of sin on the part of Christians in general, but he could also have spoken of popes, of Roman congregations, and of bishops and clergymen. This history of slavery, in fact, is mixed with responsibility on the part of the Catholic hierarchy too.”
No Need for Arachnophobia
Arachnophobia (fear of spiders) “is often the result of ignorance,” says the magazine South African Panorama. Reporting on the work of Dr. Ansie Dippenaar, a leading authority on African spiders, it points out that less than 0.2 percent of the world’s known species of spiders are dangerous to man. In their proper place, these little creatures should be treated as friends, not foes. They are invaluable in controlling crop pests. A single spider of some species can kill up to 200 pest larvae a day. If spiders are allowed to remain in a strawberry field, for example, there could be a yield of up to 2.4 tons more per acre [6 tons per ha] than in fields where the spiders have been killed. “Farmers should conserve spider populations,” the article adds, “thereby also limiting the use of costly pesticides which contribute to the pollution of the environment.”