Excerpts from DeGraaf, Wann & Naylor 2005
“We now work more hours each year than do the citizens of any other industrial country, including Japan.” [page 5]
“Though we constitute only 4.7 percent of the earth’s people, we account for 25 percent of its global-warming greenhouse gas emissions.” [page 5]
“Ninety-five percent of our workers say they wish they could spend more time with their families.” [page 5]
“Forty percent of our lakes and streams are too polluted for swimming or fishing.” [page 5]
“A CEO now earns 475 times as much as the average worker, a tenfold increase since 1980.” [page 5]
“Since 1950, we Americans have used up more resources than everyone who ever lived on earth before then.” [page 5]
“We spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches ($100 billion) than on higher education ($99 billion).” [page 13]
“The average American possesses 6.5 credit cards, for a nationwide total of 1.2 billion.” [page 19]
“More than seven million pounds of spaceship pieces are hurtling around the planet at 22,000 miles an hour.” [page 35]
“America’s 111 million households contain and consume more stuff than all other households throughout history, put together.” [page 36]
“Wal-Mart imports 10 percent of all America’s total imports from China, and if it were a country, it would rank ahead of Great Britain and Russia in total imports.” [page 66]
“According to the United Nations Environmental Program, Americans spend more for trash bags than 90 of the world’s 210 countries spend for everything!” [page 90]
“We may be in the middle of the most severe extinction since the fall of the dinosaur sixty-five million years ago…we are losing species a thousand times faster than the natural rate of extinction.” [page 99]
“Between 1949 and 1995 the production of synthetic chemicals increased six thousand times and we now produce 1,600 pounds a year per capita…..out of 75,000 chemicals now in common commercial use, only about 1,200 to 1,500 have been tested for carcinogenicity.” [page 101]
“If you go back to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of the English language, to consume meant to exhaust, to pillage, to waste, to destroy. In fact, even in our grandparents’ generation, when somebody had tuberculosis, they called it ‘consumption.’ So up until this century, to be a consumer was not to be a good thing; it was considered a bad thing.” [page 139]
“The amount of money spent on advertising and marketing in 1997 (close to $1 trillion) exceeds the total GDP of the world just a little more than a century earlier.” [page 158]
