Canals of the California Water Project, which brings water from sparsely
populated Northern California to heavily populated Southern California.
( Tom Tracy, Photofind, San Francisco)

be solved unless racism, poverty, exploitation, and war are tackled at the
same time?

Needless to say, these problems are not new (although their present scale
and increasingly complex interactions sometimes make them seem so). Ac-
tually, some of the most serious problems of the ecological variety began with
the invention of agriculture, some 10,000 years ago. Many civilizations in
the past suffered ecocatastrophes as rising population densities led to agri-
cultural practices which overstressed natural systems. The ruins of Angkor

Ruins of Mayan temples in Tikal, Guatemala. ( Larry Keenan, Jr., Photo-
find, San Francisco).

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