The oceans are rising and the low lands are being entombed beneath the waters. This might seem a metaphor for current economic development, but no. It's a photograph of the world as it will be in the not-so-distant future, according to predictions of scientists consulted by the United Nations.

For more than two decades, the prophecies of ecologists were met with jokes or silence. Now scientists are saying they are right. And on June 3, none other than President Bush had to admit for the first time that disasters will happen if global warming is allowed to continue. At the same time, Bush announced that U.S. emissions of global warming gases will increase by 43 percent over the next eighteen years. After all, he presides over a nation of automobiles, more than 200 million of them. Thank god babies can't drive. In a speech he gave late last year, Bush praised solidarity and defined it, too: "Let your kids wash the neighbor's car."

"Nature is very tired," wrote the frail Spaniard Luis Alfonso de Carvallo. The year was 1695. If only he could see us now.

A large area of the map of Spain is being left without soil. The dirt is just blowing away, and sooner than later the sand will come in through the cracks in the windows. Only 15 percent of the Mediterranean's forests are still standing. A century ago, trees covered half of Ethiopia; today, it's a vast desert. The Brazilian Amazon has lost forests the size of France. At this rate, Central America will be counting its trees like a balding man counts his remaining hairs.

Erosion is forcing peasants in Mexico to leave their fields or even the country. The more degraded the planet's lands become, the more fertilizers and pesticides will have to be used. According to the World Health Organization, these chemical "helpers" kill three million farmers a year.

Like human languages and human cultures, plants and animals are dying, as well. According to biologist Edward O. Wilson, species are disappearing at a rate of three per hour. And not only because of deforestation and pollution: Large-scale production, export agriculture, and the uniformity of consumption are annihilating diversity. Just a century ago there were more than 500 varieties of lettuce and 287 types of carrots. And 220 varieties of potato in Bolivia alone.

The forests are being stripped, the Earth is becoming a desert, poisons are filling the rivers, the ice caps and summit snows are melting. In many places the rains have simply stopped while elsewhere it pours as if the skies had cracked open. The climate of the world has gone mad.

Floods and droughts, cy-clones and uncontrollable fires are becoming less and less natural, and yet, in the face of all evidence, the media insist on calling them so. And what a stunning example of black humor that the United Nations proclaimed the 1990s the International Decade for the Reduction of Natural Disasters. It was the most disastrous decade on record. Eighty-six catastrophes that left five times more dead than wars did during the same period. Almost all victims, 96 percent to be exact, died in poor countries, which experts insist on calling "developing countries."