Summer 2004
Did you know...
About 25% of today's medicines come from the rainforest, and only about 1% of that source has been tapped.
1.5 acres of rainforest are destroyed every second.
The average U.S. citizen uses over 660 lbs of paper each year.
The Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon after a vote of 355-4 in the House and 92-0 in the Senate.
More than 24,000 species worldwide are endangered or threatened by human activities.
It's estimated that we are losing one plant or animal species each day.
According to the World Resources Institute, 100 species die each day due to tropical deforestation.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists seventeen species of butterflies as endangered, two as threatened.
Thirteen North American species of bat are considered endangered. Bats are essential for the pollination of many tropical foodstuffs such as bananas and mangoes.
There are about 450 active chemical ingredients approved for use as pesticides
Every week, more than 500,000 trees are used to produce the two-thirds of newspapers that are never recycled.
American consumers and industries throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months.
Americans go through 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour; only a small percentage of these are recycled.
Every year we dispose of 24 million tons of leaves and grass clippings.
The impact of the average U.S. citizen on the environment is approximately 3 times that of the average Italian, 13 times that of the average Brazilian, 35 times that of the average Indian, 140 times that of the average Bangladeshi, and 250 times that of the average sub-Saharan African. (Source: UNICEF, The State of the World's Children)
"In the U.S.A., in 1971…2 million cars are halted at stoplights with their engines running. This means that the equivalent of 200 million horses are jumping up and down going nowhere." From COSMIC COSTING by Buckminster Fuller
About 2,000 trees per minute are cut down in the rainforests. Over the last decade, over 113 million acres of rainforests have been destroyed.
The world is 71% water. Of the 29% of the earth's surface that is dry land, 20% is too dry for agriculture; 20% is too cold for agriculture; 20% is too mountainous for agriculture; 20% of the land surface is forested or marshy; and 20% of the Earth's land surface is left available for growing food and all the other crops that we need for our ever-increasing population.
The deforestation rate in Brazil's Amazon, the world's largest jungle, jumped 40 percent in 2003.
Americans use automobiles for more than 90 percent of their daily trips. An average person travels more than 9,000 miles a year by car, compared with less than 4,000 miles four decades ago. The average driver spends 443 hours a year behind the wheel.
Sixty-one percent of Americans say they are either active participants in or sympathizers with the environmental movement.
There are 540 national wildlife refuges in the U.S. Of those, 59 were set up to protect endangered species.
The typical American household washes 400 loads of laundry per year, leading to a total of 35 billion loads washed by the U.S. every year. An average washing machine uses 40 gallons of water per full load of clothes.
Fifty-eight percent of the world's coral reefs are potentially threatened by human activities.
A German ornithologist discovered that urban nightingales, forced to compete with noise pollution, can sing so loud they break the law. The loudest recorded was 95 decibels, which is as loud as a chainsaw.
The Silicon Valley Toxics coalition estimates that the 315 computers that will be obsolete by 2004 contain approximately 600,000 tons of lead.
On average, 91 industrial compounds and pollutants can be found in an American's blood and urine.
A large new study found that up to half of all plant and animal species on land could face extinction by 2050 because of global warming.
If car numbers keep increasing at the present rate, there will be more than a billion on the road by 2025. Today, motor vehicles put out 900 million tons of carbon dioxide a year—about 15 percent of our total output.