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.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the critical issue of water supply scarcity as populations grow in the Middle East, affecting food production.
Lester R. Brown points to a pressing global crisis in the Middle East where rapid population growth outpaces the available water supply, leading to a decline in grain production. This unprecedented situation illustrates the challenges of sustainability and resource management as more people require food, yet the water necessary for irrigation is diminishing, posing serious threats to food security and regional stability.
In practice
In a speech addressing climate change at a conference, this quote could emphasize the urgency of global water scarcity.
Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it.
Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.
If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist.
Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.
All of a sudden, space isn't friendly. All of a sudden, it's a place where people can die. . . . Many more people are going to die. But we can't explore space if the requirement is that there be no casualties; we can't do anything if the requirement is that there be no casualties.
Life ... is a relationship between molecules.
One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden.
If two scientists are giving their papers at a symposium, and one of them is just naturally better at talking to the public or talking to a group of people, that scientist is liable to get more attention - in fact, I'm told that they do get more attention - than the one who's a little more stiff about it. Well, that's not good for science.
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