Urban blight or urban bounty?
Cities consume 75 percent of the world's resources and spew three- fourths of its waste. Mayors from 71 cities -- from Cape Town to Copenhagen, Jakarta, and Zurich -- have had enough. Teaming up with the United Nations and San Francisco, host of this year's ''Green Cities'' World Environment Day commemoration, civic leaders are issuing a 21- point pact aimed at cutting, to zero by 2040, the amount of waste cities send to landfills while reducing electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Ambitious plans, to be sure, but organisers say they want every mayor on Earth to read the plan and say ''We can do these things.'' Will they?