Dr. Arsenio Rodriguez said during a March 13 lecture that sustainable development is crucial to preserving the Earth's scarce resources. Details...
Rodriguez is an expert on sustainable development with the World Bank. He emphasized that any approach to solving the world’s resources shortage must integrate political, social and ethnic considerations.
“Today, we stand at a crossroad of human history. Never before have there been so many of us on this planet, but the planet’s resources remain constant.” Rodriguez noted that 20 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of the available resources, the world’s oil consumption has tripled in the last 30 years and 65 percent of crop land has some degree of soil degradation.
“Today, we are experiencing the widespread effect of ecosystem decline: fish kills, water contamination, air pollution,” Rodriguez says. “An area the size of Texas is deforested every year.”
Rodriguez warned that failure to address the issue of depleted resources could have grave consequences. “Mesopotamia and other nations went ‘out of business’ due largely to agriculture problems,” Rodriguez said.
His lecture was part of the Voices of Discovery speaker series, which brings experts to the Elon campus to discuss current issues related to science.