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Sunday Morning News

'Time' Magazine Correspondent Discusses Health of Our Planet

Aired April 16, 2000 - 8:40 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Earth Day 2000 is upon us. In fact, on Saturday, environmentalists all around the world will celebrate the 30th Earth Day. To mark the occasion, "Time" magazine is out with a special edition entitled, "The State of the Planet." And among other things, it offers an exclusive look at an unprecedented United Nations assessment on the health of the planet.

Eugene Linden contributed to the issue. He's been involved in every special environmental project that "Time" has published over the past decade and he was the one who penned the article about that U.N. report. He joins us from Washington. You may recall him, we talked to him a little while ago about his book, "The Parrot's"...

EUGENE LINDEN, "TIME" MAGAZINE: "The Parrot's Lament."

O'BRIEN: Its laments. That's my lament for not remembering that. Nice to see you again, sir.

LINDEN: Very good to be here.

O'BRIEN: All right, this is tough reading and quite frankly made me depressed about the state of the planet. It ticks off a series of things in an unprecedented fashion and its a grim to moderately grim picture no matter where you look. Do you walk away with any shred of hope?

LINDEN: Yes, I think we have to, for one thing. There's changing values around the world. People are beginning to recognize it. In fact, the report is sponsored by the World Bank and the UNDP, in part, and that the development, major development agencies are beginning to see that healthy economies must rest on a healthy environment is an extremely positive development.

That being said, the message from this report is that the capacity of the planet to deliver both for nature and for civilization has been grievously injured. It's like a pitcher who's asked to throw innings day after day after day. He may be able to do it, but his future is ever more in question.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's just run through a couple of these statistics which are in the U.N. report. Half the world's wetlands were lost in the last century, 58 percent of coral reefs imperiled by human activity, 80 percent of grasslands suffering from soil degradation, 20 percent of dry lands in danger of becoming deserts. Those are all staggering statistics. I guess the question -- I mean, when you look at that, those numbers all kind of in one place, it carries a lot of weight with it. But nevertheless, the U.N. is sort of notorious for issuing these reports, they get filed away and that's the end of it.

What will become of this report? Will any action be taken?

LINDEN: Well, first of all, what's remarkable is that it hasn't been done before. There have been countless assessments of regions and, you know, fresh water and things like that, but nobody's tried to take a look at the capacity of the earth as a whole to continue to deliver goods and services. It's absolutely essential if we are going to put economies on an ecologically sound footing. Every major environmental treaty requires that nations take into account the health of ecosystems and yet there's nothing for them really to turn to.

And as one scientist put it, I mean, we only began to make progress on ozone depletion and climate change when scientists got together to do that kind of assessment and now maybe they are getting together and this assessment of various ecosystems will start to bring progress in that direction, as well.

O'BRIEN: One theme which comes up time and again as you read this issue is the contrast between the haves and the have nots in this world, the haves being tremendous consumers and generators of the pollution, the have nots not necessarily in a position to be preserving ecosystems which are so valuable to the planet as a whole. That seems to be a fairly insoluble problem.

LINDEN: Well, one thing that I think does come through in this study is that the poor suffer more from ecosystem degradation than the rich. They live in the forests that are disappearing. They live in the polluted, near the polluted coastal zones. They depend on fish. A billion people depend on fish as a primary source of animal protein. The capacity of the world's fisheries has been seriously degraded. Two thirds of the marine catch depends on mangroves or coral reefs or wetlands in some point of their cycle and yet all of those systems are under threat. So it's the poor that are going to get hurt by the continued degradation of those ecosystems.

In China, in last year's Yangtze floods, we had 3,600 people killed, more than 14 million made homeless and $35 billion in damage. That was the result or exacerbated by deforestation in the uplands. So the poor are certainly getting it in the teeth from environmental degradation. It's not a rich man's problem.

O'BRIEN: Eugene Linden, who writes one of the important articles in this special edition of "Time" magazine, "The State of the Planet," also the subject of CNN/Time's broadcast this evening on CNN, also the author of "The Parrot's Lament." There, I said it right. Thanks for being with us, Eugene.

LINDEN: Thank you.

O'BRIEN: We'll see you again soon. LINDEN: Delighted to be here.

O'BRIEN: All right.

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