Gary Jennings

Gary Jennings is a free-lance writer. He is also the author of Black Magic, White Magic, and The Killer Storms.

All of the off-road vehicles panic birds and animals, crush ground nests and eggs, cave in the dens of small creatures - and raise a murderous rage in the hearts of real outdoorsmen. The Shrinking Outdoors, 1972.

The average topsoil cover of this continent was nine inches deep when the white man came, and those nine inches had taken countless millions of years to build up. Today, only 350 years later, the average topsoil is six inches. Ibid.

In the time it takes to scan this phrase - there! - a dozen new children have been born into the world. Another 120 are born each minute, more than 7,200 each hour, more than 1,200,000 each week. Every three and a half years, the world adds the equivalent of the entire population of the United States. Ibid.

The United States is the world's most affluent country - and the most wasteful. With only 6 percent of the world's people, it uses more than 50 percent of the world's natural resources, converting them first into man-made products and then into man-made garbage. Ibid.