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CHAPTER 1

Dangers to the

Natural Environment

Pollution of the Skies and Seas

The Beauty of Nature

Until this century, Japanese people lived among beautiful woods and forests, grassy parks and gardens of flowers, pure water, and fresh air. This was true even in the cities, not to mention the suburbs and remote villages. Aerial photographs taken early in the century show our cities studded with natural greenery. Even when we engaged in commerce or industry, we could feel the presence of nature around us. Although our daily lives were urban, the greenery around us refreshed us and kept us feeling pure and natural.

In the past, a five-minute walk from a residential district would lead to a different world—a beautiful grove where we could breathe the fresh air and refresh our souls. We could see the sun shining above the trees or feel a gentle breeze blowing. Beyond the trees, we could see fields bathed in sunshine. We could smell the fragrance of wildflowers. The water in the babbling brooks was clear and pure, and we could flirt with the fish darting through them.

Even in the cities the air was fairly fresh. When we breathed in the morning air, we could feel the natural energy of health arising in our souls. Today, the refreshing feeling of the morning air is dulled by the pollution of the past night. When we think back carefully on those days, we can call up many other memories that nature has given us.

The point is that in the past even our cities enjoyed so much nature. The populations of our cities were smaller, and our urban lifestyles did not pollute the environment so much. It goes without mention that nature was even more beautiful in rural districts. Now destruction of nature has become a worldwide problem. Nature had never been damaged to this extent until the last forty or fifty years. During this short period—only an instant in the long history of humankind—we have cruelly crippled our natural environment, and now it is dying before our very eyes.

It is becoming apparent that our destruction of nature directly affects the lives and deaths of humans as well. Still, many people underestimate the severity of this destruction. They imagine that the environmental crisis is a problem only for future generations, having no immediate impact while they are still alive. They do not pause to reconsider their own behavior and activities that are causing this degradation of nature, much less to find and adopt lifestyles that would minimize the destruction.

The Illusion of a Limitless World

People used to think that the universe was shaped like a bowl, covering the flat lands of the earth. They thought that the earth was center of the universe, and that the sun, moon, and stars all moved around the earth. In Europe this was known as the Ptolemaic theory, widely believed until about three hundred years ago. Since the Vatican strongly maintained this theory as Christian orthodoxy, hardly anyone dared to publicly challenge the theory.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) were among the first modern Europeans to assert that the earth moved around the sun just like the other planets. Copernicus's contemporaries could not stomach his new theory, which purported to show that the earth was not the center of the universe. Copernicus first presented this theory in about 1512 but refrained from publishing his earth-shaking De revolutionibus orbium coelestium until shortly before his death in 1543. Even a century later, in 1633, the Roman Inquisition forced Galileo to renounce all his beliefs and writings supporting the Copernican view.

People are always upset when their long-standing beliefs prove mistaken. When what we thought was a proven world-view turns out to be an illusion, and a totally different paradigm replaces it, we call it a Copernican revolution. Today, a Copernican revolution in the worldview of all people is desperately required.

We need to realize that the earth is not limitless. The polluted and injured earth is trying to tell us that it does have its limits. However, most people seem blind to its agony, and seek comfort by clinging to the illusion that nature is limitless or at least large enough to take care of itself.

To human eyes, this small planet looks huge, indeed almost infinite. With its vast oceans, expansive fields, towering mountains, and broad valleys, the earth seemed infinitely larger and greater than the premodern people who walked through it. Harboring the illusion that the earth was as infinite as the universe, people thoughtlessly kept on damaging it.

Just as the people who believed in the Ptolemaic theory of the universe found it difficult to accept the Copernican theory, we may find it difficult to realize that the earth is not limitless. But we must awaken to this realization, for ignorance of the earth's limitations is one of the major factors contributing to today's environmental crisis.

The Industrial Revolution

Living in a country like Japan, in an age like today when we have ample food, clothing, and housing, we tend to forget the days when humanity was far poorer. Two centuries ago the world was gasping with poverty and hunger, and many people died from diseases even in "advanced" countries. Beginning in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution sought to overcome this poverty, to realize a richer and better life. Mass production—division of labor, interchangeable parts, assembly lines, mechanization, the steam engine—replaced and vastly increased the small output of single artisans. Engineers replaced theoretical scientists in prominence, as their countless improvements in engines of production, power, and transportation led to the acquisition of undreamed-of capital. The century from 1750 to 1850 became known as the century of invention; England invented new machines one after another as if she were the magician of the world.

In 1768 Watt invented the steam engine, which wrought a revolution in the world of power. In the following year a steam-powered loom was invented, so the weaving of cloth was no longer limited to the size and speed of human hands. As a result, the textile industry became England's main industry, and the demand for cotton fiber led to increased colonization of India. As more machines were needed to expand production, the demand for steel naturally grew, leading in turn to the development of metallurgy.

Soon iron smelting and blast furnaces were developed, which required coal, first as fuel and subsequently as an essential ingredient of carbon steel. Higher grades of iron and later steel made possible yet larger machines, and the development of an entire machine-tool industry. The demand for coal increased rapidly, so more and more coal was dug from British and European coal mines.

The demands of industry for raw materials naturally led to improvements in transportation, and the steam engine was soon harnessed in the service of transportation. American John Fitch invented the steamboat in 1786, and military inventors like Robert Fulton became famous for their improvements in the launching of the Clermont on the Hudson River in 1807. But it was not until the steamboat reached England and industrial demand for coal reached America that steamboats revolutionized canal and river traffic. George Stephenson's invention of the steam locomotive in 1815 led quickly to the first railways, the Stockton and Darlington in England in 1825, and the Baltimore and Ohio in America in 1828. For roughly a century, until the popularization of the automobile, rail transportation became the major means of overland passenger as well as freight transportation. These revolutions in industry and transportation laid the groundwork for modern capitalist society.

Coal Pollution

It goes without saying that the prosperity of the so-called advanced or First World countries is based on the industrial revolution. Ever since the industrial revolution, the developed countries have been continually trying to advance their technologies, while the developing world has been trying to emulate them and achieve its own industrialization.

Leaders of industry acquired the machines that made mass production possible, virtually limitless stocks of coal and ores, and the means to transport huge tonnages of raw materials and finished products. Ignoring the deleterious effects of their industries on nature even more than they ignored their effects on the laboring masses, many leaders of industry optimistically opined that industry would turn our world into an affluent paradise. They thoughtlessly built more factories in the cities, laid more railways, and expanded the routes of their steamships. Dark sulfuric fumes from burning coal belched from the chimneys of factories and factory towns, from steamboats and steam locomotives.

This was the beginning of large-scale urban air pollution caused by coal. A pall of smog blackened the skies of London like a dark cloud. People could not even dry their laundry for lack of sunshine. Thousands of city dwellers fell victim to chronic bronchitis, asthma, emphysema, black lung disease, and other respiratory ailments. Diphtheria, cholera, typhoid, and smallpox broke out frequently in the congested and unsanitary industrial cities.

Japanese find it hard to believe that laws of public hygiene and pollution control, enacted only in recent decades in Japan, were already on the books a hundred and fifty years ago in England. However, it is true: the English improved their cities, constructed sewage systems, and passed concrete laws to limit pollution. America too passed regulations against industrial exhausts, and mayors who promised to prevent pollution won in a number of elections. But these laws were not well enforced in either England or America, as the demands for coal increased annually. The concerns of the industrializing countries to overcome poverty outweighed their concerns to conserve the natural environment.

The necessities of adequate nutrition, warm housing, clothing, and the control of contagious diseases by vaccination and hygiene, soon gave way to the more extravagant desires for railway travel across the continents and steamship travel around the earth, as well as for accumulation of luxury goods. Seeing their dreams come true before their eyes, people failed to consider the damage caused by pollution and thought only of how to make their lives yet more convenient and luxurious.

Nature untouched by urbanization was still reminiscent of the age-old struggle for food and warm shelter, of animal and insect-borne diseases and inadequate sanitation. Europeans acquired the conceit that if they could only conquer nature, they could eliminate suffering and disease. Even in the worst days of London smog and Thames River pollution, the earth as a whole was still relatively pristine and beautiful, and nature still functioned to purify itself on a global scale.

The Petroleum Revolution

Europe and America developed economically successful capitalist societies as a result of the industrial revolution. Their quest for new resources and new markets led to European colonization of Asia, Africa, and Australia; and to American expansion to the Pacific, Oceania, and the Philippines. The colonialists brought with them their ideals of mercantilism, capitalism, and industrialism. So the results of the industrial revolution traversed the oceans and spread throughout the world.

Karl Benz built his first internal combustion engine in 1878, producing the first motored tricycles and bicycles in 1885. The internal combustion engine produced more power in a smaller and lighter package than coal-fired steam engines. The twentieth century saw the application of the internal combustion engine to mass-produced motorcars and airplanes. As petroleum-fueled vehicles sold by the millions, petroleum began to replace coal as the world's leading source of energy.

Refined petroleum also appeared to be an efficient fuel for industry, producing more energy per ton than coal. As a result, inconceivably large amounts of petroleum came to be used for industrial fuel in factories all over the world, as well as for fuel in transportation.

Petroleum was not only a fuel for transportation and industry, but also a lubricant for precision machines. Petroleum was the raw material for plastics, synthetic detergents, dyes, fertilizers, industrial and agricultural chemicals, and medicines. Petrochemical products became indispensable to every field of industry and life.

Coal, petroleum, and natural gas are fossil fuels, indispensable sources of energy for technological development. Fossil fuels were produced by more than 300 million years of plant evolution and geologic compression. At the present rate, in a matter of a couple of centuries, humans will exhaust all the petrochemicals on earth, making the atmosphere incapable of supporting healthy animal life, and the development of new drugs or materials from petrochemicals impossible.

Coal contributed to the industrial revolution, whose objective was to overcome poverty. Petroleum advanced this process even further, leading to an unprecedented standard of living and convenience. So fossil fuels created a revolution in modern lifestyles. But the road through the industrial revolution to a modern, affluent lifestyle was also fraught with environmental pollution. It was a history of belching black poisons into the blue skies, of pouring industrial wastes into the beautiful rivers and oceans.

Although some people felt uneasy about the pollution of their environments, they kept on pursuing affluence and pleasure, thinking that nothing serious would happen, at least in their own lifetimes. One of the reasons for their unconcern was the notion that the world's resources were limitless. Many people who do not care about the environment or preventing pollution still harbor this illusion.

Another reason was doubtless the conceit of "conquering nature." Humanity has received incalculable benefits and gained immeasurable wisdom and knowledge from nature. When people forgot this and began to think that they could conquer nature, their appreciation of nature began to dwindle. At the same time, people forgot to reflect upon themselves, and gradually sank into the one-dimensional quagmire of desire for whatever material prosperity their technology could bring about.

If we do not examine ourselves strictly and put into practice an enlightened environmental ethic, we will never find ways to purify the earth. All the international conferences and legal restrictions in the world will be empty and impotent without the ethical cooperation of industries and consumers alike.

The Greenhouse Effect and Desertification

"Polar bears in the Arctic are now as dirty as rats in the cities." This is the sad warning of a prominent scholar investigating the conditions of wild animals in Canada. There are no factories in the Arctic. Nevertheless, a thick smog cover, 100 miles wide and 200 miles long, blankets the skies of the Arctic. Even the polar bears, among the animals farthest from pollution, are dyed gray by photochemical smog, and an unbelievable amount of PCBs is accumulated in their internal organs. The polar bears are not the only animals to suffer. Fish, seals, and even Eskimos have been polluted by countless poisons for which they have no responsibility. This is the state of the Arctic, long believed to be the purest land on the earth.

Even more dreadful than visible smog is the rise in atmospheric temperature due to the greenhouse effect. The main reason for this is the large amount of carbon dioxide given off when we burn fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide raises the earth's temperature because it absorbs the heat (infrared rays) that would otherwise radiate back into space, and turns the atmosphere into a heat sump. Alaskan permafrost is already starting to melt, disturbing the foundations of many buildings and rendering human habitation of certain areas extremely problematic. Melting Russian permafrost has cracked Russia's aging petroleum pipelines, leading to massive oil spills in the Siberian tundra. And the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf is the beginning of a process that will raise the world sea level by several meters in a few centuries.

As the ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic melts, the oceans will overrun coastal lowlands, from uninhabited Pacific atolls to the Bangladesh delta with the highest population density in the world. Popular concern is reaching serious proportions in countries like the Netherlands, with much land already lower than sea level.

However, the most dreadful phenomenon brought about by the rise in atmospheric temperature is the impact on global climate patterns and resultant desertification.

As global temperatures rise, the earth's climate becomes chronically abnormal, and some areas become too hot and dry for greenery to grow. Then forests gradually turn into scrub, and brushy grasslands into deserts. This disturbance of the millennia-old balance of nature will snowball into an avalanche of abnormal phenomena.

The famines and wars that have plagued Africa for years, the droughts and floods of the Indian subcontinent, news of unusual landslides in the South American Andes—all of these are examples of abnormality caused by human disturbance of the balance of nature.

Acid Rain and Chlorofluorocarbons

Another factor that turns forests into deserts is acid rain coming from the burning of fossil fuels, especially by internal combustion. The sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides in exhaust gases dissolve into atmospheric water vapor, turning it into nitric and sulfuric acid rain.

Acid rain acidifies lakes and rivers, killing the fish. In Canada alone, over thirty thousand lakes have become dead lakes, so acidic that they cannot support animal life. The process of acidification ultimately leads to the deformity and extinction of numerous species of aquatic life.

Acid rain also decomposes brick, concrete, and limestone, including world-famous artistic treasures made of stone. For example, the stone pillars of the Parthenon in Greece have been eroded, and the goddess's face is dissolving into a smooth expressionlessness. Monuments and cathedrals in England and Germany and the Taj Mahal in India are also suffering damage from acid rain. Each of these countries is devoting billions of dollars just to preserve their historic monuments from the erosion of acid rain.

The most terrifying aspect of acid rain is that it kills the world's soil, vegetation, and crops. Acid rain has withered 75 percent of the pines in the Black Forest of which the Germans are so proud. 28 percent of the trees in all the forests of France have suffered damage. In Norway, 25 percent of the trees have perished. Poland has given an urgent warning to the world that its forests will disappear during the next century if acid rain continues unchecked.

Acid rain also blankets Asia, Africa, and South America. It has browned the pine forests of Japan, partly by directly damaging the pine needles and partly by acidifying the soil. Pines in acid soil lose their resistance to disease and parasites, their brittler branches break easily in even light wind or under a light covering of snow, and they become increasingly appetizing to Japanese pine weevils. Crops in some places in Japan have also incurred severe damage. The rise in temperature and the death of forests are both very serious problems that affect the life of humankind and indeed of the earth itself.

Another frightful effect of air pollution is the destruction of stratospheric ozone by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and nitric oxides. The ozone layer is a layer of triatomic oxygen about twenty kilometers thick that covers the earth. It absorbs most ultraviolet light and other high-energy solar radiation that is harmful to living creatures.

CFCs are used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and commercial cleaning operations. Although outlawed in Europe and America, they are also used in Asia in aerosol cans for paints, insecticides, and hairsprays. CFCs have no known direct effects on the human body, but when they evaporate to the stratosphere they destroy the ozone layer. One CFC molecule can neutralize tens of thousands of ozone molecules. When this happens, harmful ultraviolet radiation penetrates directly to the earth, and this becomes a cause of malignant skin cancer. Japan's Showa Antarctic Research Base has recently reported a continent-sized hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic.

Japan is the world's largest producer and consumer of CFCs and has refused to sign the international treaties restricting their use. This is another example of how the myopic drive for profit and convenience blinds consumers as well as manufacturers to the environmental consequences of their product choices.

Historical Functions of Forests

Imagine what it would be like if the trees in our neighborhood failed to put forth leaves in the spring, and all the trees withered and died like skeletons. The very thought is enough to make us shudder. In fact, satellite investigations have demonstrated that we are losing vast areas of forestland every year. This is due not only to global warming and acid rain, but also to the deforestation of the developing countries by the demands of developed countries for lumber and beef. Observing the destruction of our tropical forests, no one can fail to sense a grave danger.

Everyone knows that we cannot live without forests. We all unconsciously remember the fact that we humans evolved from forest-dwelling primates. We feel our bodies and souls energized and recharged when we walk through a forest. One reason is that plant photosynthesis turns carbon dioxide into oxygen. Another is that the air is purified and that plants moderate the temperature and humidity. So plants are both the sources of our oxygen supply and natural purifiers of our air. Plants act as the lungs of the earth, keeping our planet alive by circulating water, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide between the soil and the air.

Plants supply food for humans and innumerable other forms of life. Tropical forests also constitute environments for plant and animal life forms so numerous they have not even all been identified. But the vast variety of life in the tropics should not lull us into the illusion that it is unlimited; on the contrary, every year hundreds of tropical species become extinct.

We are now mutilating the lungs of the earth using the technology that we developed in order to make our daily lives more pleasant and affluent. As our emission of carbons and other atmospheric poisons exceeds the ability of the diminishing forests to reprocess them, we create an unsustainable imbalance that leads swiftly down the road to our own extinction.

Four and a half billion years have passed since the earth was born; three and a half billion years since the predecessors of modern plants produced enough oxygen for the most primitive of aerobic cells to evolve. It took over a billion years for the oxygen that primitive plants produced to constitute 20 percent of the air, making animal life as we know it possible. In a matter of a few centuries, humans could reverse this process and make the atmosphere incapable of supporting healthy animal life.

Humans were among the latest life forms to evolve. This was only several million years ago, a mere instant in the long history of the earth. Within a single century, humans have not only prospered but also endangered their natural environment to a critical extent. If human patterns of reproduction, consumption, industrialization, and destruction continue unchecked, the future not only of humanity but of life as we know it on this planet has very few centuries left.

Ocean Pollution

The ocean is becoming a gigantic pool of waste water. The excretion and drainage of 5.6 billion people living on the earth, industrial wastes and synthetic byproducts pouring out of factories, agricultural chemicals sprayed over vast farmlands, chemicals used for raising fish along the coasts, industrial and nuclear waste dumped directly from ships—these all flow into the ocean, continually escalating its level of pollution beyond its ability to recycle.

The most dangerous among recognized ocean pollutants are industrial wastes containing synthetic chemicals, and the insecticides and agricultural chemicals permeating the soil and flowing into the ocean in underground water. The American forces introduced DDT to Japan after the war; this was especially deleterious to the balance of nature and has lasting side effects on humans and many other living creatures.

The process of larger animals eating smaller animals that eat vegetable matter or plankton is a hierarchical order of nature called the food chain. Through the food chain, DDT is progressively accumulated in the bodies of living creatures: minute traces of DDT in plankton are concentrated in sardines, and redoubled in the fish that eat sardines. Eagles, hawks, and other large birds of prey that live on fish are especially contaminated by the highly concentrated DDT, and their hormone systems are destroyed. As a result, the number of birds of prey has decreased dreadfully.

The human waste, gray water, and sewage dumped into the oceans raise the levels of ammonia and phosphorus in sea water. This in turn has killed off several species of plankton and the small fish feeding on them. In turn, the larger fish which feed on the smaller fish begin to decrease, and as a result the balance of the entire ocean food chain has been disturbed. If this trend continues it will not only affect the catch of fish for direct human use but also destroy the ecological balance of the entire ocean ecosystem.

Every living creature on earth lives within the balance of the food chain. When this balance is destroyed and the number of a certain species increases or decreases unusually, other species are inevitably affected, and life as a whole is disordered. This can lead to the extinction of entire species.

The earth maintains its organic order in this way. We humans owe the continuity of our lives to this order. Nature is great, and those who oppose or upset it will perish. The philosophical principle of respect for nature indeed has a scientific justification.

DDT is not the only poison polluting the oceans. Dioxins from bleaching, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from plastic production, trihalomethanes, thermonuclear waste, and oil spills from wars and accidents have all disastrously polluted the world's oceans.

As the water cycle circulates pollutants from the troposphere to the subsoil and ultimately the oceans, living creatures all over the world have been polluted, from the stratosphere to the depths of the sea—birds and fish, penguins and polar bears, marine mammals and humans. In time, no organism nor ecosystem can escape the effects of this cycle of pollution.

The Limits of Science

As scientific reports from around the world have started to show the calamitous conditions of the earth, people have begun to understand that the earth is not limitless. More and more people have begun to sense the danger that we will destroy the entire planetary ecosystem during the next century unless we do something now to save the air, oceans, forests, and earth itself.

If someone were attacked by a thug and lay injured on the ground, we would immediately give first aid. Before pursuing those who destroy the environment, we must do our best to heal the earth. But if the criminals continue to injure it or threaten us, we must first subdue them, and then move to heal the wounds.

The world has slowly started to move toward stricter regulation of environmental pollution, such as the reductions in carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and sulfur compounds from combustion of fossil fuels, and prohibitions against the use of CFCs, which destroy the ozone layer.

This is not enough. The American NGO Worldwatch Institute, which has published State of the World for 15 years now, points out that "there is no more time to lose" and that national and international legislation to protect the environment is still not strict enough.

The Japanese government has been particularly slow in responding, but in February 1990 it announced a Synthetic Strategy Cosmo Plan I to retard the rate of Japan's contribution to the greenhouse effect. Although this plan is still not fully enacted or enforced, it shows Japan's growing consciousness of some responsibility for environmental pollution. Rather than focusing on Japan's domestic industrial pollution or energy problems, this plan proposes foreign technological aid to developing countries and international leadership in monitoring and protecting the environments of developing trade partners.

The Japanese government is also urging private and corporate research institutes to develop nuclear, solar, and geothermal energy sources—clean energy that will not produce greenhouse gases or acid rain—and to develop substitutes for CFC refrigerants and detergents that will avoid the destruction of the ozone layer. Foreign nations are pressuring Japan to ban CFCs as they have done; Japan will surely follow suit as soon as its industries find suitable substitutes. Here again we find that in financial and industrial circles the profit motive still exceeds concern for the environment.

There are hopeful developments on the horizon. One promising product is biodegradable plastic, manufactured by microorganisms from organic matter. When disposed of in water or soil, it readily biodegrades and releases no toxic residues. Biodegradable plastic will soon be used for everything from wrapping paper to fishing nets. At last, technology at the end of this century has begun to work to save our green planet from the destruction of the environment that we brought upon ourselves.

Compared to the six billion people in the world, very few people are even aware of, much less engaged in this movement. Besides, there is a limit to what technology can do to improve the natural environment. It is impossible to rejuvenate nature completely by technology alone. What else can we do?

Start With an Appreciation of Nature

Humans cannot live without nature. Therefore we should respect nature and treat it considerately. In a sense, the idea of saving the earth is itself a human conceit. The earth has enabled us to stay alive. It has given us air to breathe, food to eat, clothes to wear, places to live, the warmth of the daytime and the peace of night, and it has absorbed our waste.

Can we save this earth? What we must save first is not the earth; it is our hearts and minds that have forgotten how precious the natural environment really is. We are losing our beautiful natural environment because we failed to appreciate it, following only our desires for material comfort, blind to the long-range consequences of our choices of lifestyles.

In our medieval ignorance, the earth looked so limitless that it could never be polluted. Today, we know better and have no further excuse for polluting it. We must realize how wrong we had been. We must admit that we have forgotten to respect and appreciate nature.

How can we appreciate nature? The answer is simple. We should begin by admiring nature. Pausing for a moment to let ourselves be impressed by the beauty of the trees and flowers is one way. Realizing how delicious our food is and all the natural processes that went into making it is another. When we admire things, we feel refreshed. To retain this feeling, we must practice morality.

Morality includes respecting nature as it is. When we live conscious of our indebtedness to and dependence upon nature, our mode of living turns into an appreciation of nature. If we live in this way, we would never waste resources nor discard poisons into the natural environment.

The Japanese of old planted two saplings whenever they cut down one tree. They knew that giving nothing in return to nature was foolish and sinful. Fishermen and hunters limited their take so that there would always be adequate fish and game in future seasons.

Our efforts to purify the polluted earth by higher levels of technology are certainly significant. However, it is even more important that we put our hearts in tune with nature. We should listen to the cries of the earth. Nature is greater than humanity; it lived in harmony for billions of years before the rise of human civilizations. The beauty of nature, the sophisticated mechanisms of the bodies of living creatures, the mysteries of the death and birth of life—we humans have no chance to feel conceited when we contemplate the sublimity and grandeur of any aspect of nature.

If we appreciate nature, we will naturally act on this appreciation. We shall no longer discard trash without thinking of its effects on the environment. We shall choose to consume less and be willing to spend more for products that protect nature than for those that ultimately injure it. We shall bear hotter or colder conditions, walk more and drive less, rise with the sun and avoid using electricity needlessly. We shall become aware that each time we hit an electric switch we are affecting the fate of the environment, and that each time we buy a commodity we are sending a message to manufacturers, packagers, and distributors about the kinds of materials we are willing to dump upon nature. In turn, nature will recompense our appreciation. Nature will respond to the decisions of the human heart, as we act them out in our lives of consumption or conservation.

If the six billion people living on the earth can realize this, our lives of thoughtful appreciation for nature will surely restore the earth close to its former beautiful balance.

Depletion of Natural Resources

Japan's Dilemmas

In the Shinjuku viaducts of Tokyo there are groups of homeless people called "Kings of the Underground." They are called kings because day and night they drink premium whisky and brandy and eat the scraps of extravagant meals that even a hardworking businessman can rarely afford. For every night, the classiest restaurants in Tokyo throw away mountains of delicacies which their patrons did not finish.

We tend to look down on the poor homeless souls who rummage about for uneaten food and half-drunk bottles discarded by expensive eateries. Thinking ethically, however, we feel a heartsick anger when seeing this situation. If we think nothing of trashing mountains of gourmet food every night, we face the hell of spiritual decay in the near future.

The waste and decadence of the Japanese nowadays goes far beyond this. Truckloads of fresh foods left unsold at supermarkets and department stores are carted away as refuse every day. This "garbage" contains not only fresh fish, meat, and produce, but also processed foods like bread, cakes, and delicatessen dishes. To attract customers, each store manufactures and displays a wide variety of products, and if it sells enough of them to make a profit, it trashes the remainder and writes it off as an operating expense.

Even in private homes, people constantly replace older foods languishing in their refrigerators with newer purchases. City sanitation engineers report that many families stuff food still fresh enough to eat into garbage bags.

It is not only food that people waste. When we look into our desks, closets, bookshelves, or chests, we may find unused pens or pencils, goods we bought on a whim but never opened, and dusty gifts whose colors have faded. Some people throw away notebooks and binders without using them. Designs of stationery change quickly in Japan, and even if we want to buy the same type, we may find it is no longer stocked. As a result, people waste money in order to keep up with the fashion.

The waste of unrecycled paper in Japan, especially from copy machines, defies imagination. However, foreigners are most surprised to find that vacant lots in the suburbs are swamped with disorderly mounds of working televisions, still serviceable electric appliances, computers, and used cars. From food and daily necessities to consumer durables such as furniture and cars, it were almost as if Japanese companies manufactured products merely for the purpose of throwing them away. This is conspicuous consumption and planned obsolescence.

Acre per acre of land, Japan's consumption of energy and raw materials is the highest in the world. Considering that almost all of its fuel and raw materials are imported, it becomes painfully evident that Japan is wasting the world's resources. Worse yet, Japanese are wasting not only those material resources but also the time, labor, and energy used to mine, transport, process, and package those resources, and the minds and lives of all the people who engage in all those processes. In short, we Japanese are wasting not only matter and energy but also time and intelligence. We are not only exhausting the limited resources of the planet and damaging the natural environment when we discard them, but wasting the lives and minds of millions of people in our employ.

It is high time to contemplate the present state of food, raw materials, and energy from a more ethical viewpoint and to reconsider what would be a more responsible lifestyle.

Natural Nutrition

In my childhood, just after the war, I used to run barefoot through vacant lots and fields. Sometimes I would step on a sharp stone or nail and hurt myself. I would spit on the cut to clean it, press it until the bleeding stopped, and be back at play in a moment, completely forgetting the scratch. There were severe food shortages after the war, so our meals were a motley hash of whatever was available. A grilled or boiled fish was a real feast. We seldom had meat, eggs, or milk, which I thought were only given to hospital patients as convalescent food. Among my playmates were those whose black hair turned brown for lack of nutrition. Even then, their bodies were strong enough to shrug off cuts and scratches. If some kid wore an obvious bandage, he would be teased and ostracized by the group.

When American nutritional physiology was introduced, we were taught that in order to grow as strong as Americans, we had to eat more meat and eggs, and drink more milk. Some Japanese even thought that bread produced more intelligent children than rice did. Many Japanese began to imitate what they thought was a Western diet. It is true that this diet had more protein than the rations of the long wartime years, so it was a substantial improvement over our wartime diet. However, I cannot help feeling that our natural immunity to illnesses, which healed our wounds and sprains in spite of our thin bodies, has decreased compared to the past.

Nowadays it is advertised that foods rich in not only proteins, complex carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals, but innumerable trace elements and nutrients, are indispensable to the human body. These foods are also very rich in fats, sugars, sodium, and artificial additives that make them appear more attractive and therefore sell well. As a result, the bodies of many Japanese are now like a eutrophied ocean. Excessive fats, sugars, salts, and additives make a body ill. Medical science has well demonstrated that too much fat contributes to heart disease and thrombosis, too much salt to high blood pressure and strokes, too much sugar to diabetes, and too many additives to cancer.

Even from a simple diet, balanced and rich in vegetables, our bodies can manufacture many of the nutritive substances essential to good health. We do not need to ingest many artificial additives. Our bodies have the biological ability to extract minerals and reconstruct many vitamins from suitable amounts of food and carry them throughout our systems. People in the past knew this natural function of the human body from experience. That a balanced natural diet is preferable to a highly processed artificial diet has also been established as medical fact.

If we forget this simple natural power in our bodies and become unduly swayed by the trendy commercialism of processed food manufacturers, we stray from the way of natural health. This also becomes a deviation from ethics, in that we waste enormous resources of food and engender what may be a precarious food situation in our future.

Declining Japanese Agriculture

Where do we get the ingredients of the sumptuous food served on the daily Japanese dinner table? The fact is that two-thirds of them are imports; Japan produces less than half of the total calories necessary for its own sustenance. Many countries produce almost all their own daily dietary requirements. Generally speaking, people import only food they cannot produce by themselves on account of their geographical and climatic conditions. For the Japanese, such foods include tropical products like bananas, coffee, and sugar. However, we Japanese depend on imports for most of our staple foods, even for the ingredients of our native dishes.

Hamburgers used to be a trendy fad food among young people, but they have now become a standard in the Japanese diet. The beef used for burgers is almost all imported from Australia. A few burger restaurants use Japanese beef, but the cattle are fed entirely on grain that is imported from America. Of course, the flour for the buns is also imported. So Japanese hamburgers consist almost totally of American and Australian ingredients.

What about a traditionally Japanese food like sushi? The raw tuna comes from the South Pacific, the shrimp from India, Malaysia, or South America, the octopus from the coast of Africa, the sea bream from New Zealand, the dried seaweed from South Korea, the ginger garnish from Taiwan. Wasabi, or Japanese horseradish, is foreign-grown and colored with chlorophyll. Recently even our rice is sometimes imported. Only the water in which the rice is boiled is assuredly Japanese.

Or consider the case of another traditionally Japanese favorite, soba (buckwheat noodles). The Japanese buckwheat plant is indigenous, but today, 70 percent of the ingredients of buckwheat noodles come from Canada or other foreign countries. Because soba is thought to represent Japanese culture, Japanese people find it hard to believe that even its ingredients are now imported. It makes us feel painfully insecure to learn that we entrust foreign countries with manufacturing soba, which used to be a staple unique to the Japanese diet. If we want to retain control of our national food supply, we must produce the staple ingredients of our foods in our own country.

In distancing our food from our culture, we lose an appreciation of our food. We no longer know anyone who raises the crops, and food becomes just another disposable commodity like anything else. Ultimately, we lose all sense of ethical responsibility and throw away uneaten food without compunction. Our dependence on imports even for the ingredients of our traditional dishes like tofu, miso, and soy sauce leads to our loss of control of our culinary culture. At the same time, our ability to buy any food for money alone, without thinking of its origin or the labor that went into producing it, has eroded our ethic of appreciating each food. Poor Japan no longer grows its own food, but only processes and consumes imported ingredients.

Japan's industrial strength and highly valued yen have enabled it to import food from almost everywhere. Even starving countries sell food to surfeited Japan to obtain foreign currency. Japanese markets are indeed full of food, but this opulence is tenuous and superficial. Since we Japanese no longer produce our own food, we are dangerously at the mercy of the world food situation. We must be aware that Japan produces the least food per person of any major country.

Climate Endangers Staple Imports

Staples such as rice, wheat, barley, and soybeans are by far the most important items of the Japanese diet. When we think of the Japanese diet, we first think of cooked rice; the Japanese language uses the same word for rice as for meal. Japanese and Chinese noodles; macaroni, spaghetti, and other pasta; bread, breakfast cereal, crackers, cookies, cakes, candies, and countless other foods made from grain cover the entire gamut of our eating habits. Even meat, and dairy products like milk, butter, and cheese are dependent on grain because they are provided by grain-fed cattle. Cereal grains are an indispensable source of complex carbohydrates, the primary caloric intake of our diet. If unrefined, like brown rice and whole wheat, they also provide important vitamins, minerals, and proteins.

Even though grain is so central to our diet, Japanese produce significant amounts only of rice and depend on imports for almost all other cereal products. Now some people say that Japan has become a leader among industrialized countries, and that a decline in self-sufficiency of grain is inevitable in any highly industrialized country. However, this shows a grave lack of understanding.

Even including rice, Japan produces less than a third of the grain it consumes. By contrast, the United States and Canada produce almost twice as much grain as they consume. France produces 150 percent of its own grain, West Germany and Italy 80 percent each, and even Britain 65 percent. By international comparison, the Japanese rate of self-sufficiency in grain is extremely low.

All the major industrialized countries except for Japan remain big agricultural producers as well. Japan buys most of its grain from such industrial giants as the United States and Canada. This would be no problem if these trade partners continue to provide Japan with wheat and soybeans indefinitely. Recently, however, there is reason to fear that the imbalance of nature could suddenly and adversely affect their crop production. In that case, Japan might be left seriously short of dietary staples.

Sixty years ago there was such a big drought in the American prairie states like Oklahoma that they came to be known as the dust bowl. Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck described this in his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which was made into a Hollywood movie starring Henry Fonda (1940).

Even if American farming methods can stave off another dust bowl, American farmland is gradually losing fertility due to topsoil erosion, long years of chemical fertilizing, and highly fluctuating weather conditions. The United States Department of Agriculture has issued warnings about the present situation in its report called "Responses to the Challenges and Opportunities Facing American Agriculture."

At the same time, developing countries in Africa, Asia, and even Latin America run short of food because of their population explosions. When upriver communities log virgin forests to make way for croplands, downriver communities face disastrous flooding, which in turn washes away precious topsoil and crops. For example, flood damage in India and Bangladesh has been exacerbated by deforestation in Nepal, Assam, and Kashmir, through which the tributaries of the Ganges and Brahmaputra flow. Similar phenomena can be found in floods of Africa and Latin America.

In the long run, deforestation damages the entire ecosystem, accelerating desertification and diminishing harvests. In addition, global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, topsoil erosion, salinification, chemical hardpanning, and countless other factors endanger world food production. How should Japanese people and policy makers prepare themselves to face such a predicament? What are our most ethical as well as prudent alternatives?

Returning to Unprocessed Foods

Now is the time to choose and practice a more enlightened and progressive lifestyle. This begins with a diet of unrefined grains and unprocessed foods. Unrefined grains and unprocessed foods naturally rebuild our bodies and promote our health. Our own bodies know that nature puts great nourishment into natural foods; our bodies can manufacture what other elements they need from a balanced diet of natural foods. We can enjoy this blessing in a life of appreciation achieved through our eating habits.

If we follow this message and pass it on to others, we can eventually affect the diet and consumption patterns of the entire country. In this age of overeating, it requires ethical reflection and coordinated action to affect lifestyles and diet on a national level, but this can all begin on an individual level.

Decadent overeating of highly processed foods not only damages our physical health but also numbs our perception, retards our calculation and memory, and ruins our minds. This mental degradation corrupts everyone's lives and ethical judgments and ultimately ruins the culture and the people. The declines of many great cultures were in part connected to decadent eating habits.

Today millions of people in Africa and Bangladesh tragically suffer from malnutrition if not starvation. At the same time, not only the industrial West, but even many developing countries are consuming far more highly processed diets than ever before. This is an ominous sign foreboding danger on a worldwide scale.

Where a people are strong and upright, their eating habits tend to be modest. Japan's Meiji period (1868-1912) provides a good example. In many families of good lineage, people made it a rule to have only seasonal vegetables and a cup of miso soup with brown rice at each meal. Their dinner tables may not have been lavish, but they mustered from such simple meals the power to transform Japan into a politically and industrially advanced country.

Meiji Japanese did not know nutritional analysis based on modern physiology. They simply trusted the potential of the human body and the nourishment of natural foods and succeeded in making full use of this natural power. Without worrying about dietary supplements, they achieved well-balanced meals by following a traditional diet of brown rice, soybeans, and seasonal vegetables. Modern people should all follow their lead. We face grave concerns for the stability of the world food supply and face deadly diseases caused by the overconsumption of the fats, sugars, and additives in over-processed foods. Eating a natural diet of unpolished grains, soy protein, and local vegetables in season can go a long way to improving our self-sufficiency as well as our physical and mental health.

Japanese Deforestation

Everyone in the world benefits from forests. Even desert-dwelling Bedouins feel most refreshed when they find themselves in the shade of an oasis after a long caravan journey. Japanese people feel a particular affinity for forests, where our forefathers lived long even before rice was introduced to this archipelago. The cleanliness, solemnity, and beauty of Japan's forests; the law of nature in which germination, growth, aging, dying, and rebirth are continually repeated; the ways the space of the forests harbored many animals; and the lives of these animals—these things taught us much about life. The virgin forests of Japan were a sort of mirror reflecting proper human behavior.

Forests richly provide the resources of our daily lives. From houses, furniture, vehicles, farm implements, hand tools, kitchen utensils and tableware to paper and musical instruments, the vast majority of traditional Japanese things were forest products. Japanese farmers not only produced rice and vegetables, but continuously protected and replanted their forests. This traditional attitude toward nature was a virtue of which Japanese can be proud. Seeing how many countries have felled their forests for the pasturage of livestock, the Japanese tradition of conservation offers lessons that not only foreigners but also the Japanese themselves now have to relearn.

Forests do not remain beautiful and healthy merely by being untouched. They need care, as in the pruning of lower branches and the weeding out of diseased trees. For centuries, people gathered firewood from deadfall, harvested nuts and berries, and replanted trees whenever they felled one. These ongoing if invisible labors preserved Japanese forests for centuries. Japanese forests were brutally lumbered during the war, when overseas materials became unavailable; even Japanese airplanes were made of wood. The postwar Japanese government dedicated tremendous funding to reforest its denuded mountains with cryptomeria. Today, forests from Hokkaido to Okinawa are flourishing, and most of Japan's wood is imported, so it need not lumber its own forests. It is thanks to these many conservation efforts that we can enjoy our forests today.

Despite its devastating and indiscriminate logging during and immediately after the war, Japan managed to limit its importation of foreign lumber to 10 percent of its annual consumption until 1960. In Japan's remarkable economic growth of the 1960s, the demand for lumber mushroomed again, and reforestation (which requires roughly thirty years) could no longer keep pace with the speed of logging. Japan's young forests could not provide the volume of broad planking required by its booming construction industry. Following America's example of buying foreign oil rather than depleting its own resources, Japan chose to buy cheap tropical lumber from Southeast Asia rather than razing its own reserves again. Japan began to rely heavily on imports for lumber, plywood, and pulpwood, and began to buy lumber from Canada, the United States, the Soviet Union, and subsequently Southeast Asia. Japanese importation of wood products amounts to 20 percent of the world total, and that of raw lumber amounts to 40 percent.

In 1989 Japan bought the rights to lumber tropical forests in Malaysia. Europeans then staged a boycott of Malaysian trees to protest Malaysia's reckless lumbering practices. After devastating Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, Japanese logging ventures are now hacking away at the tropical rainforests in the Malaysian state of Sarawak.

According to a 1981 UN survey, tropical forests were disappearing at the rate of 28 million acres annually, and the figure is much larger today. This means that an area half as large as mainland Japan disappears every year. At the present rate of destruction, tropical rainforests will vanish from the earth in the next thirty to fifty years. It is obvious that Japan is the culprit of Asia.

Countries that earlier exported lumber to Japan are now refusing to do so, in order to protect their own forests. Japanese logging companies' destruction of tropical forests in Southeast Asia has become the target of worldwide criticism. While the global trend is to protect greenery, the immorality of the Japanese is questioned. This is indeed ironic in view of Japan's long love and custodianship of its own forests.

Japanese unrecycled waste of building forms, paper, and all manner of disposable wooden and paper products is destroying the tropical rainforests of Asia. The disappearance of greenery due to environmental pollution and human exploitation of forests is concomitant with a new worry about the future of humanity itself. This fact too shows the strength of the relationship between humans and forests.

About eight thousand years ago, when the agricultural revolution led the first humans to establish permanent settlements, 6.1 billion out of the earth's 13 billion hectares of land were covered with dense foliage. Forests today comprise only 2.7 billion hectares. Fifty-five percent of the world's forests have already disappeared. These precious forests are still being destroyed, by indigenous peoples for fuel and pastureland, and by foreign corporations, especially Japanese. We Japanese, who thought we had learned the wisdom of nature, cherished our own beautiful forests, and created a wonderfully harmonious social life by practicing ethics, find ourselves among the killers of the world's forests.

Nature grows at a very slow pace. Ancient people who loved and lived within nature matched their pace of life to nature's. They gratefully used only a limited amount of lumber, which did not damage the life of the entire forest. This amount even contributed to regenerating the forests, and there was complete harmony between forests and humans.

We have no choice but to learn from our ancestors how to protect our forest resources and revive the beautiful greenery of the earth. We must start reforesting the tropics, conserving present forests, prohibiting indiscriminate logging, and finding alternative fuels and incomes for those who live in and around tropical forests.

If we continue to consume paper and lumber at the present rate, the earth will lose its tropical forests in the next generation and almost all its forests in the next century. We must commit ourselves to stop wasting trees and paper. There is already a grass roots movement urging that we carry our own chopsticks and avoid disposable chopsticks when dining out. This is one good way to awaken our consciousness of the deforestation problem.

In our mountains of household wastes, the most conspicuous item is paper. Innumerable junk-mail advertisements, leaflets, and pamphlets are stuffed daily into millions of mailboxes, unsolicited and unread. We can write or call the senders and ask that they discontinue these wasteful mailings. Millions of magazines and comic books are read and discarded every week. We can recycle them rather than throwing them away into landfill. We can use our own cups, chopsticks, and shopping bags instead of consuming new paper every time we go out.

We can find countless examples of the waste of wood and paper in our lives, and for every example we can find a simple alternative. The important thing is to look around us with eyes full of ethical gratitude and to practice ways to avoid unrecyclable waste.

Imported Ores and Energy

It is widely observed that Japan lacks mineral ores and sources of energy. Metals and energy are prerequisites for industrialization, yet Japan has very few of them. Only by dint of its diligent labor and later by high technology was Japan able to industrialize, by adding value to foreign raw materials and reselling them for a profit. Japan imports raw mineral ores; smelts them into purified metals such as steel and aluminum by high-tech electrolysis; presses, rolls, and stamps them into sizes appropriate for their respective manufacturers; and finally moulds them into consumer goods and industrial commodities.

Because of their low price, high precision, durability, and design, Japanese products were welcomed around the world. Japan obtained foreign currency and raised its standard of living by its manufacture and export of industrial products. To maintain their standard of living, the Japanese must continually import foreign resources, transform them into marketable products, and reexport them. In the 1990s other Asian countries are competing with Japan in the same game, and the Japanese yen is pricing many Japanese goods out of third world markets.

It goes without saying that this cycle consumes mineral ores and energy. Japan lacks these mineral ores and energy sources even more than it lacks food and wood resources. If consumption of mineral resources continues at its present rate, some of them predictably will be exhausted in the near future. The countries that mine ores may move to protect their own resources. Then what will become of Japanese industries that depend almost entirely on imports?

When we examine Japanese rates of dependency on imported mineral ores, we notice that Japan depends entirely on other countries for these resources: 99 percent for iron ore, 93 percent for copper, 78 percent for lead, 63 percent for zinc, 98 percent for tin, 100 percent for bauxite (aluminum), and 100 percent for nickel. Moreover, Japan produces only about 10 percent of its own energy, from waterpower and coal. This means that Japan purchases almost 90 percent of its energy as uranium and petroleum from abroad. Japan's 10 percent rate of energy self-sufficiency is extremely low when compared with 81 percent for the United States, 62 percent for the United Kingdom, and 46 percent for Germany.

Eighty percent of Japan's imported energy is petroleum. This would pose no problem if oil were producible indefinitely. In fact, if the world continues to increase its oil consumption at the present rate, known oil reserves will be exhausted around the year 2020.

Japan is undoubtedly one of the most industrialized countries in the world. However, when we contemplate the resources that enable Japan to keep its position, we cannot but realize the instability of the ground on which Japan stands. We simply cannot afford to waste. As leaders and examples to the world, we must reduce our energy consumption, and make a practice of reusing things with care and compassion in our daily lives.

A Tragic Waste of Resources

Japan is no longer dark at night. Not only are street lamps lit all night long, but brightly lit shops are open twenty-four hours a day, and many corporate showrooms and stores are fully illuminated whether open or closed. Some lights in giant office buildings are left on throughout the night. Countless buildings are designed so that their windows cannot even be opened, requiring electrical heating, cooling, and ventilation throughout the year. These are an enormous waste of electric power.

Then there is the notorious Japanese passion for excessive wrapping. At supermarkets, for example, small shrink-wrapped fish and produce are again wrapped in small plastic bags, that are in turn put together into larger plastic bags. Consumers discard such bags as garbage; they are scattered to the winds and find their way to fields, ponds, and even mountains. Many swans, ducks, and waterfowl are entangled or choke on these floating bags and die, as do fish which mistake the bags for food. Even whales and porpoises eat plastic bags, painfully suffering for a long time before dying of asphyxiation.

Wrapping is not only a matter of plastic bags. Even candies, cookies, Japanese crackers, and chocolates are individually wrapped in foil and cellophane before being packed in a plastic box which is in turn wrapped in cardboard, cellophane, and paper. We must think how much oil, wood, and metal are wasted in the production of such highly wrapped items.

Electric appliances and personal computers are now used and discarded as fashions change. For example, Japanese people throw away TVs and stereos, washing machines and electric irons, electric fans and heaters that still work well, only to buy fancier goods of the same type one after another. Perfectly serviceable personal computers and word processors are abandoned as soon as updated models appear on the market, and pile up by the score in vacant lots in the suburbs. Used bicycles and cars are no exceptions. That they cannot fetch a decent price on the used market also reflects a deep-seated Japanese preference for new fashions over merely usable items.

Japan consumes in one week the iron, copper, lead, and aluminum resources that many developing countries would consume in a year, and petroleum vanishes almost instantly, not only as fuel but as the raw material for plastics. Leftover materials are discarded at construction sites and buried in valleys and swamps all over Japan along with other industrial wastes.

This is the appalling reality of our electronic, computerized society, that pays so much lip service to saving resources and energy. What on earth can our convenient society save? Our convenient and comfortable standard of living has only been achieved by industrial exhaustion of all kinds of resources. We must awaken to this fact. Depending heavily on foreign food, wood, energy, and metal ores, we "advanced" peoples of the world will surely go down as the villains of history if we continue our present patterns of conspicuous consumption and unbridled waste.

We must first instill ethics into our personal lives. Based on a compassion for every being in this world, we must conscientiously avoid wasting things, time, and minds. The first step in this process is to buy only necessary things, to use them gratefully, and to seek a meaningful lifestyle unmoved by fashions and advertising.

If we Japanese could regain such an ethical lifestyle, the world might once again look at Japan with respect and admiration. Other countries will most willingly provide us with the resources necessary to maintain our industrial economy when they believe that providing us with those resources will bring about the true happiness and prosperity of the rest of the world.

Conserving Pure Air and Water

I remember watching a scene on television where desert tribespeople meticulously gathered every drop of evening dew from the leaves of the desert plants and stored it in earthenware pots. Concentrating to save every single drop, their tense countenances were a silent rebuke to us who take water for granted.

When thinking of resources and energy, we are apt to forget air and water, because they seem to be freely given as if from heaven. But without air we could not make fire even if we had fuel, and without water we could not drive the turbines that produce electricity. Without air and water we could neither cook nor process foods nor conduct any of the countless cooling, washing, and processing operations of modern industry. It goes without saying that the most fundamental resources that sustain our bodies are air and water. So these two substances are our ultimate resources. Even though air and water seem almost limitless, when they are polluted they are practically useless.

In addition to consuming a wide range of minerals and fossil fuels in the process of industrialization, we also contaminated our air and water so badly that it is now a tremendous challenge to restore them to their former state. This pollution of air and water poses grave dangers to our physical health in the immediate future. Our thoughtless and continuing pollution of air and water is attributable to our pursuing material wealth rather than contemplating the long-range ethical consequences of our decisions and actions. Such material wealth cannot be termed true prosperity if it deprives us of the basics of clean air and water.

Ever since the industrial revolution we have striven to make our lives richer, more comfortable, and convenient. As a result, we now confront difficult problems we must solve without delay. We can still strive to attain a better life, but our definition of this better life must be rephrased in terms of environmental quality rather than in the past terms of crude acquisition of capital.

Ethics are needed to give a viable answer to this question. An ethics of environmental sustainability will become the requisite standard of human action and save human beings from poverty, exhaustion, and devastation. The more people put ethics into practice, the purer society will be. The action of those who practice an ethically enlightened lifestyle will be reflected upon the world of nature. Then air and water, forests and fields, and all the living beings within the ecosystem will gradually recover. Only a thoroughgoing environmental ethic has the power to restore this endangered planet in the long run. Then nature and ethics will be fundamentally unified and form a universe understood as a spiritual unity. When we appreciate this potential of ethical living, we will understand what a great hope ethics offers for the future of the earth.