The madness of global statistics...

Half of the world's population lives on less than $2 per day. Almost 20% of the adult population of South Africa has HIV, while AIDS and a host of curable diseases kill millions annually throughout the developing world. 70% of the world's fisheries are fished to capacity or overexploited. 25% of the world's bird species are estimated to have gone extinct in the last century. A 1- 4 degree F rise in global temperature is predicted in the next 50 years without a drastic turnaround in our current CO2 emissions -- a change that would result in the drowning of small island nations, flooding of coastal cities, increased storms, and a re-shuffling, with highly uncertain results, of the world's major biomes. Efforts up to this point have not been at the scale necessary to transform a world's worth of burning, slashing, and catching, designed to keep our bulging human numbers warmed and fed.

Take a deep breath...