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Today, June 5, is World Environment Day, a day set aside by the United Nations to create international awareness of the environment and to encourage political attention and action. With so much affecting our environment, it is good that there's one day assigned to spread the word. But we need everyday efforts to defeat or even come close to balancing the forces destroying our environment.

The most destructive force on the planet is people. Each person, just like each living organism affects the environment. We breathe and in doing so change the chemical makeup of the air. We ingest food and water and produce liquid and solid wastes. We carve out habitats.

Individually, human activity may not seem to be much of a problem.

But the combination of our growing numbers and our growing appetites is tearing the Earth apart.

What humans do, moreso than any other living organism, is convert theenvironment into cash. We rip apart the Earth's body to get metals and petroleum deposits that we manufacture into every product imaginable.

This is not something new. Ancient tribal humans dug into the Earth with sticks, primitively mining for flintstones to make tips for arrows and blades for knives and hatchets.

Modern machines, however, enable us to multiply our effort and rip away whole tops of mountains to get at the coal, to dig deep foundations, move huge quantities of soil and rock, deliver tons upon tons of concrete and pile building blocks on top of each other hundreds of feet into the air. All of this is done, not with human muscle, but with the energy delivered by the sun, captured by plants, and stored for millions of years as oil and coal.

6.8 billion people

There are 6.8 billion people living on the Earth. That number is growing at the rate of 3 per second (that's births minus deaths). Think of it: every second we have to find clothing food, shelter, schooling, jobs, transportation for three more human beings - that's every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

In the twenty seconds it took to read the previous paragraph, we had to make room at the planet's breakfast table for sixty more people.

While Bermuda's birth rate fluctuates - the latest data show it as growing - our population is steadily increasing at about 400 per year due to natural increase (births minus deaths) and in-migration (we import workers for 70 per cent of all new jobs created). At the same time our

population and per capita consumption are increasing, our clearing of land for housing, offices and hotels reduces the stock of trees, which are the Earth's primary source of the oxygen we need to breathe and run our machines. It also reduces the land available to grow food.

Bermuda is not sustainable. We import 85-90 per cent of our produce and

around 80 per cent of the fish we consume. The only thing we produce in any great quantity is waste. Per capita, we are at the very top of solid waste producers in the world.

We are fortunate in having a vast ocean surrounding us so that the pollutants we generate with our vehicles and waste incineration, and the liquid wastes we pump into the ground are carried away by ocean breezes and currents. Even so, our inland waters are polluted and the air quality is bordering on poisonous in places where traffic is dense.

If Bermuda's population density and consumptive lifestyle was replicated around the world, inland waters everywhere would resemble cesspools and the air would be hardly breathable. That's not a good sign.

What can we do? For World Environment Day we can commit to repair rather than damage the Earth. Check out website:

http://www.unep.org/wed/2009/english/content/tips.asp for ways you can help.

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