“While it's probably still too soon to celebrate, BP appears to finally be getting the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico under control. But many of the world's greatest environmental catastrophes continue, with no end in sight.”All of the events featured in the article are truly global, ecological “disasters”—massive numbers and devastating consequences. The statistics relating to long-standing coal fires in China, in particular, are staggering. Underground coal seems in Inner Mongolia have caught fire (presumably because of explosions) and have been burning constantly since “the early 1960s”:
“Covering an area more than 3,000 miles long, China's northern coal fires are estimated to destroy as many as 20 million tons of coal per year, more than the entire annual production of Germany. According to some estimates, these fires could be the cause of up to 2 to 3 percent of the world's carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.”Another amazing statistic, this one related to the pollution of the world’s oceans:
“According to the U.N. Environment Program the world's oceans contain 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile. These plastics are responsible for the deaths of more than a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals every year.”And I worry if I fail to recycle a plastic bottle! It puts the task ahead of us in perspective.
Have a good weekend.
David
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Stakeholders in a Global Environment (2e)
© Sage Publications, 2011
http://www.sagepub.com/strategiccsr2e/
Instructor Teaching Site: http://www.sagepub.com/strategiccsr/
The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: http://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/
The World’s Ongoing Ecological Disasters
By Joshua E. Keating
Foreign Policy
July 16, 2010
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/07/16/the_world_s_worst_ongoing_disasters
