Education
It
prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the
beginning, of the collegiate experience.
David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR,
and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International's
excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10
Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.
If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a
second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human
mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the
number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add
2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon
annaabi.ee 
