Ed Ring

Whether or not we have turned the corner is debatable, but the earth has truly been in the balance. On the margins of this conflict in the trenches of politics, in the vastness of the oceans, across the length and breadth of the earth, and in the battle for hearts and minds, the foot soldiers do contend. Few armies have fought as long or as hard as the veteran troups of the Rainforest Action Network. Randy Hayes is the Founder and President of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). This is a group well known by friends and foes alike in the ongoing battle over the fate of the world's forests. They have won spectacular victories in the effort to convince corporations worldwide to adopt...

Reforesting Central America with Trees, Water and People The best thing that ever happened to me was going to Central America to help treeplanters. I was fortunate to have a first-hand look at some of their finest work, when I went there with Stuart Conway, an EcoWorld Hero and co-founder of the reforesting group, Trees Water and People. "Caben Tres" is a way to sum up Stuart Conway's driving in the hills of Guatemala, or Honduras, or El Salvador. He took me with him on a whirlwind two week tour of his tree nurseries and watershed protection projects in June 1998. The rainy season was just starting, the civil wars were over, and the roads were filled with sugar cane trucks with trailers...

Samuel Gruber looks like a cat who's had a few lives. He is a man without pretense, a man with so much personal credibility you wonder if he was ever young and crazy. This single-minded EcoWorld Hero has been saving sharks for nigh on forty years. Though he's in his early sixties, in spite of or perhaps because of his lifelong devotion to his passion, Dr. Gruber appears a much younger man. In September 2000, I heard Dr. Samuel Gruber speak at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, in a beautiful new building nestled in the dunes just south of the Moss Landing marina. Behind us loomed the centerpiece of Moss Landing, and of the Monterey Bay for that matter: the great square lattice and...

Peter Knights co-directs WildAid, which is probably the most under-recognized heroic environmental organization on earth. Somehow Peter Knights went from being a graduate of the London School of Economics to a leader on the front lines of the fight to save endangered species. I don't know how this man in his mid-thirties got from there to here, and I didn't ask. But talking with him last week at their offices in San Francisco, it was clear there was not only uncommon courage but great intellectual substance to this warrior for the environment. WildAid has their offices on the 2nd floor of a 1907 building on the north side of Pacific just east of Montgomery. Including Peter...

How much water have we really got? It would seem like quite a lot, since the earth's surface is 71% water. But appearances can be deceiving. All the water on earth would fit into a cube not quite 700 miles on a side. If that seems like a lot, remember this includes oceans and icecaps. All the fresh water in the world, including icecaps and groundwater, would fit into a cube just over 200 miles on a side. And if you limit your water to lakes and rivers, all of them in the world would fill a cube a mere 36 miles on a side. Since the icecaps are frozen, and groundwater is replenished very slowly, this 36 mile cube, representing all the water in all the lakes and rivers of the world, is all we've got Moreover, only about half the amount stored in Earth's lakes and rivers is replenished each year by snow and rainfall. This renewable amount is how much humans, plants, animals and...

Here, recently, the human body was referred to as a "Simple Machine," and the article explored the ramifications of life extension; the ramifications of human aging being slowed, human diseases being eliminated. This achievement, if you will, is the logical extension of our accelerating skills in the area of genetic manipulation and nanotechnology. There are a host of species whose "machinery" is much simpler than the human structure, and in these areas human-engineered change at the genetic level has already begun. Genetically engineered food crops, virtually unknown ten years ago, now occupy over 100 million acres of U.S. farmland. This is an astonishing 167,000 square miles, an area larger than the entire state of California. Over half of the soybeans grown in the U.S. last year were genetically engineered, and over a third of the entire U.S. corn crop. The decision by major...

What wonders are there in simplicity? The human structure, compared to the vastness of the universe, is a simple system, relatively easy to master. Any reasonably technological civilization will soon learn to alter genes and prolong their natural spans. It's very simple. It's amazing that the sci-fi writers of the 20th century almost all envisioned star travel coming along soon; none of them spend much time with humans achieving near immortality. The genome will be charted by 2003. With the internet, the dynamics of the proteins will annotate the records for the genes at a rate that will astonish all. Barring catastrophic reductions in research and development worldwide, the technology for significant life extension therapies is one generation away, at most. Our simple machines will live longer and longer. In altered bodies we will begin to tinker with mortality, with natural...

Capitalists will often accuse environmentalists of worshiping the earth. In their eyes, environmentalists are a type of religious cult. To many capitalists, environmentalists don't merely see ecosystems, they see a sacred, harmonious unity of earth, water, weather, plants, bugs, beasts, watched over by a sentient, metaphysical presence; Mother Nature, Gaia. These are environmentalists for whom trees are conscious beings and high elves walk silent and immortal in the forests. All of this is silly, the capitalists say, and maybe they're correct. It's probably true that some environmentalists, maybe some of the deep ecologists, are people who worship the earth. But pure capitalism also becomes a form of fundamentalist worship when it becomes the only principle to govern all actions of civilization. To say that capitalism is the only path, the only road for society, the inevitable...

Driving over the Sunol grade, bound south west on Interstate 680, is driving into the heart of the Silicon Valley. The south estuaries of the San Francisco Bay stretch out to the north and north west, and the vast Santa Clara Valley forms an all encompassing plain, with distant mountains covered with clouds blown up from the Pacific shore. Driving into the Silicon Valley, in the summer of 1999, is driving into a place which is the epicenter of the greatest civilizational shift in human history. For the first time, humans are acquiring a collective information nervous system. We may end up like Borg, or we may end as bundles of pure, metaphysical energy, or something else, but our race is changing. Sixty years ago, in the summer of 1939, we lived on the brink of World War II, and the epicenter was somewhere between London and Berlin. That our race could engage in total war between...

Imagine the tentacles of technology spanning the earth like the arms of an octopus around a watermelon. The grip of a feeding octopus on the fragile sides of our earth, this moist watermelon, has been more apropos as a metaphor for technology than the more recent internet derived concept; an infinite web of conduits pouring consciousness amidst and between some six billion souls. Up till the dawn of the internet, it was tough to argue that technology, in general, helped the environment. Up till the dawn of the internet, all that technology meant to most environmentalists was steel saws and steel tractors, dams and salinization, concrete, clear-cut logging, air pollution, poisons in the water; technology had benefits, of course, but technology could easily facilitate, unwittingly, the destruction of all life on earth. With the dawn of the internet, the tentacles acquired a brain...