FIGURES

1.1	Intricacies of nitrogen cycling in a crop field preclude any accurate management of the nutrient’s flows
1.2	Optimal crop fertilizing depends on the unpredictable supply of moisture
1.3	How not to forecast
1.4	Futility of forecasting. Two dozen American mid- to short-term energy forecasts of the country’s total primary energy consumption in 1985
1.5	During the past generation life expectancies increased appreciably in every poor populous nation
1.6	International prices of crude oil and wheat
1.7	No imminent exhaustion: world-wide reserve/production ratio for crude oil stood higher in the early 1990s than at any time since The Oil and Gas Journal started to publish its annual review of reserves and production
1.8	Sequential satellite images of Sudan show how the border between vegetation and desert in the Sahelian zone fluctuates with rains
2.1	Exponential rise of global, and Asian, populations during the past two millenniums
2.2	Declining fertilities in Asia’s three most populous countries
2.3	Dutch wheat yields and Japanese rice harvests
2.4	Exponential rise of global fossil fuel consumption
2.5	Orderly substitutions of leading primary energy resources show long lead times required for a new source to gain a substantial share of the market
2.6	Major crude oil export streams show the dominance of Middle Eastern supplies and the global nature of the oil trade
2.7	An outstanding example of technical improvements: as better designs became commercial, transmission capacity of optical fibres has increased by five orders of magnitude in just two decades
3.1	Spatial and temporal scales of environmental change
3.2	Dry and wet acid deposition over Europe in the mid-1970s
3.3	Spreading acidification in eastern North America
3.4	With Brazil as the single exception, all poor populous countries have a relatively small amount of farmland which is steadily declining
3.5	Areas of the highest soil erosion in the United States
3.6	Deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia
3.7	Annual water withdrawals
3.8	The shrinking Aral Sea
3.9	Composition of the known biota is heavily dominated by insects; vertebrates are relatively insignificant in terms of total species
3.10	Earth’s unique atmosphere in comparison with the two very similar compositions on its two planetary neighbours
3.11	Biospheric carbon cycle circulates the element rather rapidly between the atmosphere, biota and the mixed ocean layer
3.12	Approximate trend of global atmospheric CO2 since 1800, and annual averages at the Mauna Loa observatory, where the concentrations surpassed 350 ppm by 1989
3.13	Increasing atmospheric concentrations of four other leading greenhouse gases: methane, nitrous oxide and two CFCs
3.14	Difficulties in detecting a clear warming signal are illustrated by a hypothetical warming scenario
3.15	Principal chlorofluorocarbons
3.16	Declining exhaust emission of NOx from American cars compared with the Japanese standard and with the best available controls
4.1	A successful technical fix: during the 1980s the fuel consumption of an average American car went down by about 15 per cent in spite of the fact that the average distance driven went up by more than 10 per cent
4.2	A missing incentive: in 1991 there was hardly any incentive for consumers to buy, and for auto-makers to develop, highly fuel-efficient vehicles
4.3	While American GNP doubled between the early 1960s and the mid-1980s, the index of sustainable economic welfare calculated by Daly and Cobb (1989) has hardly changed
4.4	World-wide correlation between GNP and primary energy consumption is above 90 per cent
4.5	Correlation between GNP and primary energy consumption is rather weak for a relatively homogeneous group of industrialized European countries even when their economic products are adjusted for purchasing power parities
4.6	Another illustration of a weak GNP-energy correlation is shown for the World Bank’s group of middle-income economies
4.7	Long-term decline of energy intensity in major western economies displays expected national idiosyncracies, as well as the general downward trend after the increases during the early stages of industrialization
4.8	Encouragingly rapid recent decline of China’s energy/GNP ratio started already before the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in 1979, and it continued steadily during the 1980s
4.9	Infant mortality drops precipitously with increasing energy consumption between a few and 50 GJ/capita per year
4.10	Life expectancy at birth
4.11	Good access to post-secondary education (defined as at least 20 per cent of eligible population actually enrolled in such institutions) requires generally per capita energy use above 70 GJ/year
4.12	Rise of French affluence
4.13	The figures show how the declining water application rates supported higher productivity of irrigated Israeli crops
5.1	Fertilities have declined everywhere since the middle of the 20th century except in sub-Saharan Africa
5.2	Solar deprivation of tropical, and also some monsoonal subtropical, regions
5.3	Distribution of remaining large blocks of wilderness shows disproportionate concentration in climatically stressed, low-productivity boreal and desert ecosystems
5.4	Power densities of fossil fuel extraction and thermal power generation are orders of magnitude above the typical power densities of energy consumption in modern societies
5.5	In contrast, power densities of direct and indirect solar conversions and of tidal and geothermal energy are orders of magnitude lower than the common consumption power densities
5.6	Per capita emissions of CO2 through fossil-fuel combustion and land-use changes