This week I learned a new word, and I want to share it with you. The word is “desertification,” and it is used to describe a phenomenon by which an increasing amount of the Earth’s surface is gradually turning into barren, uninhabitable desert.

As a matter of fact, this week marked the 10th anniversary of a U.N. program called the Convention to Combat Desertification that was designed to arrest this phenomenon. Never heard of it? Well, neither had I, but that isn’t surprising. Americans, after all, aren’t exactly noted for their environmental awareness.

According to U.N. reports, we are losing more habitable land to desertification every year, and the rate of loss has been increasing through the last three decades. In the 1970s about 624 square miles per year were being lost, in the ’80s it was 840 square miles per year, and from the mid-’90s to 2000 it was up to 1,374 square miles per year.

By 2025, two-thirds of the land in Africa could be a desert, along with one-third of Asia and one-fifth of South America. An estimated 135 million people could be displaced by this climate change phenomenon, causing political and economic turmoil that is difficult to calculate.

What’s causing this creeping desert syndrome? You might have already guessed that it’s thought to be caused mostly by human activity. As populations increase in areas that are already stressed in terms of the availability of clean water and arable land, scarce water supplies are being depleted, forests are clear cut to make way for development, grasslands are overgrazed, and fields are overfarmed. These activities cause areas that are already borderline deserts into full-fledged wastelands.

Existing deserts like the Sahara in Africa and the Gobi in Asia are expanding over those continents like a middle-aged man’s creeping bald spot. Unless the tide is turned, the Earth will continue to look more and more like a desert planet.

I remember a scene in a science-fiction movie I once saw (I forget which one) where some alien race had come to Earth intent on destroying humanity, and in this case their reasoning was that mankind was like a virus on planet Earth. We take more than our fair share of the natural resources, kill anything that we can make use of or which gets in our way, and have little concern for the damage we do to our host organism. Humanity had to be stopped, said this alien presence, before we figured out how to travel to other planets and sucked up their resources and killed off their native inhabitants in a quest for our own continued survival.

That may be an extreme view, but it is hard to argue against the contention that despite all of our intelligence and advanced technology we seem to have turned into a cancer on the Earth’s ecosystem. Few of us stop to consider how our actions affect the living earth and fewer still are willing to change any aspect of our lifestyle out of consideration for the health of the environment.

Some people believe that there will come a day when God will visit plagues and natural disasters on the Earth as part of a final judgment for the sins of man. Sometimes it seems like divine intervention may not be necessary for this to happen. We are gradually turning the Earth into a place that’s not fit to live in all on our own, and it’s beginning to feel a little less like paradise and a little more like that other, warmer place with each passing day.

Bill Ferguson is a columnist for the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph. His e-mail address is fergcolumn@hotmail.com.