Worldwatch turns 30.

• Author: Flavin, Christopher
• Position: LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

Birthdays are times both to look forward and to look back. As Worldwatch completes its first three decades, we are doing both.

The changes the world has witnessed over that period are breathtaking. And indeed, it was the anticipation of unprecedented and accelerating global change, and its vast implications, that led Lester Brown and his colleagues to found the Institute in 1974.

At the time, the world population had just reached 4 billion--it is now over 6.3 billion--and the world economy was well short of half of its current size. In 1974, the world was in the midst of its first oil shock--precipitated by an Arab oil embargo--and chemists Sherwood Roland and Mario Molino had just published their landmark study connecting depletion of the ozone layer to the buildup of manmade chemicals in the atmosphere. The prospect of rapid global climate change was not yet taken seriously, and problems like AIDS and bioinvasions had not yet been identified, let alone entered the global lexicon.

In 1974, environmental problems were still fresh to the world's policy agenda, with the first Earth Day and the first UN Environmental Conference (in Stockholm) having just occurred. Worldwatch was therefore founded to identify and fill a pressing information gap, alerting the world to unrecognized threats and spreading understanding about the potential solutions to those problems.

Worldwatch is one of the first "think tanks" whose central focus is environmental and whose geographic scope is global. We are proud of the role that we have played in engaging decision makers and the broader public on the core issues of our time. And we note with satisfaction that there are now many examples of new policies--such as empowering women--and new technologies--such as solar and wind power--that have begun to improve the health of people and the planet.

These accomplishments are encouraging, but as we look beyond our 30th anniversary, it is the enormous scale and ever-mounting speed of global change that commands the attention of the Worldwatch staff and board.

Each year, millions of hectares of forest are felled or burned, and millions of tons of topsoil erode. Water tables are falling in many regions, and virtually all the world's major fisheries...