However, the prospects for achieving global sustainability are grim. People in highly developed countries enjoy a gross domestic product that is twenty-one times higher than that of their neighbors in the poorest countries. They consume per capita fifty-six times more energy, while emitting thirty-three times more carbon dioxide than their poorer neighbors. In 2004, one-third of the population in the world's least developed nations was undernourished. Sixty-six percent of the world's poorest do not use improved sanitation facilities. Couple that with the fifty-one percent who do not have access to clean water and you have to wonder how much of the world's population even stays alive.

The loss and fragmentation of native habitat, wildlife dispersal areas, forest cover, and key species to over extraction or urban and industrial expansion has serious implications for human well-being, since we are all dependent on environmental resources and services. The world has lost over one billion square kilometers of forest since 1990, forest that housed and fed people and wildlife alike, harbored invaluable plants and animals, and provided critical ecosystem functions in the cycling of nutrients, carbon, and water. In developing countries almost one-fifth of the disease burden is attributed to environmental risks.

Among the byproducts of globalization is a web of commerce, power, and human migration that is arguably as complex and interdependent as the web of life. Consider the spring of 2008, when America's ethanol policies (in response to rising oil costs, which were driven in part by fears that we couldn't sustain this resource) coupled with drought in Australia, led to food riots in cities from Mexico to Egypt. Worldwide, cities can expect to face increasing pressure as rural populations flee dwindling natural resources as well as famine, drought, and other climate-related catastrophes and seek education, healthcare, employment and food security in urban areas. The majority of these new urban people, however, live in peri-urban slums where fuel, sanitation, and drinking water are elusive and certainly no longer free.

We are both consumers and stewards of the environment, and thus have competing agendas. As the food versus fuel conflict shows, inaction is not an option when economies are shaken or people take to streets and demand their daily bread. But there are seldom silver-bullet solutions. Despite advances in technology, and the shared promises they seem to hold, we are still part of the web of life. The national economy of some countries, such as Costa Rica and Kenya, depends on the provision of ecosystem goods and services, where nature-based tourism depends on charismatic animal and plant species and their natural habitat. In other countries, the national economy depends on export of natural resources, such as timber, oil, and fisheries. Communities similarly depend on environmental services such as flood mitigation offered by mangrove forests, the water retention and cleansing services of a forested hillside, the sequestration of carbon by trees and algae, and the health of the coral reef to sustain fisheries and attract tourists. Sustaining the environment and its resources has significant economic and security benefits to individuals and nations alike.

We're caught in the web of life as individuals, too. Since 1940, the emergence of infectious disease in human populations has risen, causing significant impacts on global health and national economies. While some of this rise is due to social factors, such as increasing density of human settlements, the majority of the reported emerging diseases have animal origins. And environmental problems are often related to social injustice, economic disparity, and demographic change. In Kenya, where SFS has recently launched a water conservation project, the poverty-environment link is quite clear. Where drinking water is polluted children and adults alike suffer gastrointestinal illness, leaving them too weak to study or work.

Stewards, consumers, and victims — it's hard to know how we're supposed to manage the environment. Especially during what seems to be a time of mounting crisis, from peak oil to global food shortages to climate change. Sometimes, we react to complexity and crisis by shutting down. Recently, the term “green noise” has been used to describe how even environmentalists can be overwhelmed by 1001 things (many of them seemingly contradictory) they should do to save the planet. Rather than tuning in, people may choose to tune out, or embrace simplistic and ultimately futile “solutions.” “We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change,” says Al Gore, who is challenging us to produce 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

As a whole society, we need to understand the interconnectedness of our systems of trade, governance, production, economic systems, social conditions, consumption and waste management with environmental concerns -- conservation of biodiversity, sustainable consumption and production of natural resources, and ecosystem integrity.

SFS students discover connections between environment and development, human and natural systems, and the protection and management of environmental resources. Their research can and does contribute to environmental management. They provide scientific data and information to decision makers, from resident fishermen to ministers of environment. They experience the rewards of applied research and the complexities of working with communities. And, perhaps most importantly, they experience the interconnectedness of natural and man made systems.

In the words of John Muir, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”