Farmers...can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices.

In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day.

In the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them.

Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.

In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage, and countries are scrambling to secure their own parochial interests at the expense of the common good.

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.

The foundation is being laid for the emergence of both wind and solar cells as cornerstones of the new energy economy. World wind generating capacity grew from 7,600 megawatts in 1997 to 9,600 in 1998, an expansion of 26 percent. At a national level, Germany led the way, adding 790 megawatts of capacity, followed by Spain with 380 megawatts, and the United States with 226 megawatts. In the past, U.S. wind generating capacity was concentrated in California, but in 1998, wind farms began generating electricity in Minnesota, Oregon, and Wyoming, broadening the new industry's geographical base.