http://www.precaution.org/lib/speth_1-sided.fnl.pdf

Graphs looking at changes over time. They are from this book:

THE BRIDGE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to
Sustainability

By James Gustave Speth

Apr. 24, 2008


Between Two Worlds

http://www.precaution.org/lib/speth_1-sided.fnl.pdf

The remarkable charts that introduce this book (link above) reveal the
story of
humanity's impact on the natural earth.[1] The pattern is clear: if we
could speed up time, it would seem as if the global economy is
crashing against the earth -- the Great Collision. And like the crash
of an asteroid, the damage is enormous. For all the material blessings
economic progress has provided, for all the disease and destitution
avoided, for all the glories that shine in the best of our
civilization, the costs to the natural world, the costs to the glories
of nature, have been huge and must be counted in the balance as tragic
loss.

Half the world's tropical and temperate forests are now gone.[2] The
rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a
second.[3] About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are
gone.[4] An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone,
and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to
capacity.[5] Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20
percent severely threatened.[6] Species are disappearing at rates
about a thousand times faster than normal.[7] The planet has not seen
such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the
dinosaurs disappeared.[8] Over half the agricultural land in drier
regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and
desertification.[9] Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the
dozens in essentially each and every one of us.[10]

Human impacts are now large relative to natural systems. The earth's
stratospheric ozone layer was severely depleted before the change was
discovered. Human activities have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide up
by more than a third and have started in earnest the dangerous process
of warming the planet and disrupting climate. Everywhere earth's ice
fields are melting.[11] Industrial processes are fixing nitrogen,
making it biologically active, at a rate equal to nature's; one result
is the development of more than two hundred dead zones in the oceans
due to overfertilization.[12] Human actions already consume or destroy
each year about 40 percent of nature's photosynthetic output, leaving
too little for other species.[13] Freshwater withdrawals doubled
globally between 1960 and 2000, and are now over half of accessible
runoff.[14] The following rivers no longer reach the oceans in the dry
season: the Colorado, Yellow, Ganges, and Nile, among others.[15]

Societies are now traveling together in the midst of this unfolding
calamity down a path that links two worlds. Behind is the world we
have lost, ahead the world we are making.

It is difficult to appreciate the abundance of wild nature in the
world we have lost. In America we can think of the pre-Columbian world
of 1491, of Lewis and Clark, and of John James Audubon. It is a world
where nature is large and we are not. It is a world of majestic old-
growth forests stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, of
oceans brimming with fish, of clear skies literally darkened by
passing flocks of birds. As William MacLeish notes in The Day before
America, in 1602 an Englishman wrote in his journal that the fish
schooled so thickly he thought their backs were the sea bottom. Bison
once roamed east to Florida. There were jaguars in the Southeast,
grizzly bear in the Midwest, and wolves, elk and mountain lions in New
England.[16]