Mining is fundamental to our lives - we wear and travel in; build, cook and communicate with its products daily. However, it is also one of the most environmentally damaging industries. This study examines how such a huge and multi-facetted industry can be made sustainable, minimizing its harmful impacts and maximizing its social and economic contribution. It analyses the different needs and risks of those affected, as well as issues of supply and demand of minerals throughout the world.

Looking for some concrete proposals about how to clean up the world's environmental problems? In The Natural Wealth of Nations, David Roodman argues that a critical but often overlooked source of solutions lies in the prosaic world of government subsidies and fiscal policy. If governments overhaul how they raise and spend money, they can use the market to protect the environment without hurting economic growth. For starters, why are the world's governments spending over $700 billion a year to subsidize activities that harm the environment, from logging to mining to driving? Roodman shows how cutting these wasteful subsidies can boost the economy, save tax dollars, and help the environment. But governments can do more. Hidden subsidies are only one of several reasons that consumers get misleading signals from the marketplace about the true environmental costs of their activities. Roodman proposes raising taxes on harmful activities like air pollution while cutting taxes on payrolls and profits. This tax shift would discourage pollution and encourage work and investment. The creation of tradable pollution credits is another way to use the market to include environmental costs. These proposals are not far-fetched, having already been tested in the United States and overseas. In a global survey, Roodman provides examples from Sweden to Spain to Malaysia of the growing number of countries that are successfully using these market-based approaches to clean up their environments.

Facing the Challenge of Food Scarcity

Food scarcity may soon become the dominant consequence of continuing population growth and environmental mismanagement. The president of the Worldwatch Institute assesses the situation in a provocative book published for the World Food Conference to be held in Rome in November.

The worlds leaders are slowly coming to realize what the worlds farmers have known for some time: world grain production is lagging behind population because of the failure of additional fertilizer to boost yields as it once did, the diversion of irrigation water from farms to cities, and the loss of cropland to industrial and residential uses. As world grain production has lagged during the 1990s, estimated carryover stocks of grain for 1996 have dropped to 48 days of world consumption--the lowest level ever.

Here, Lester Brown uses up-to-the-minute information to respond to the widening gap between world demand for grain and lagging yields of oceanic fisheries and croplands. He proposes steps that can be taken to expand food production and buy additional time to stabilize population, and he also explores opportunities for reducing per-capita consumption which in some societies is conspicuously excessive.

Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, lives in Washington, D.C.

The world energy economy is poised for a sweeping shift away from imported oil and environmentally damaging coal during the next few decades, according to the findings in Power Surge, the latest book from the Worldwatch Institute. Pushed by the need to stabilize the earth's climate, and pulled by the investment opportunities that beckon, global energy markets are beginning a rapid move to more efficient, decentralized, and cleaner systems, echoing the shift from mainframe to personal computers during the 1980s. Among the emerging changes expected: a new generation of lightweight, super-efficient electric cars that can be refueled at home; the rapid conversion of coal and nuclear plants to efficient gas turbines; a new generation of mass-produced wind and solar generators that are cost-competitive with the most advanced fossil plants; tiny fuel cells and rooftop solar panels that allow people to generate their own electricity; and the gradual emergence of nonpolluting hydrogen as the world's main energy carrier, supplanting oil and natural gas. The authors of Power Surge, Christopher Flavin and Nicholas Lenssen, have identified recent deployments of new energy technologies by enterprising engineers, small entrepreneurs, and eccentric tinkerers in countries around the world, providing an early glimpse of the massive changes ahead.

Mining is fundamental to our lives - we wear and travel in; build, cook and communicate with its products daily. However, it is also one of the most environmentally damaging industries. This study examines how such a huge and multi-facetted industry can be made sustainable, minimizing its harmful impacts and maximizing its social and economic contribution. It analyses the different needs and risks of those affected, as well as issues of supply and demand of minerals throughout the world.