Worried about the fate of the Euro? The student loan crisis? Unemployment? The federal deficit? Here's something we can all worry about: The latest Living Planet Report, published by the Global Footprint Network and the World Wildlife Fund, indicates that humanity is now consuming resources at a pace that is 52 percent faster than what the Earth can renew. And that doesn't take into account the rate at which we are depleting non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, minerals, and metals.
Consumed, as most of us are, by our personal finances and challenges, we fail to take note that humanity is now over-consuming resources and imperiling -- in the process -- people, posterity and the planet. That's understandable. When you are up to your eyeballs in work or debt, it's hard to see the big picture.
But we ignore the big picture at our peril.
Three thousand scientists and experts meeting in London earlier this year issued a declaration warning of "catastrophic consequences" for human civilization unless we take steps to reduce the over-consumption of Earth's resources. England's prestigious Royal Society subsequently released a report on "People and the Planet," which reached a similar conclusion. Sir John Sulston, the Nobel Prize laureate who led the team of scientists working on the report, warned of a possible "downward vortex of economic, socio-political and environmental ills."
These warnings are not new. John Beddington, the U.K.'s chief science adviser, three years ago gave a speech in which he warned that population growth, climate change, and the world's rising demand for food, energy, and water constituted a "perfect storm" that could destabilize the world by 2030, or sooner.
Last year, Jeremy Grantham, a top financial analyst and the co-founder of GMO, one of the world's largest investment management funds, wrote a newsletter in which he warned that we have entered an era of resource scarcity that will precipitate periodic shortages and cause commodity prices for food, minerals, and metals to trend ever higher in the long term.
Most of us are oblivious to humanity's impact on the world, and that is particularly true with respect to our impact on other living creatures. This week's Living Planet report indicates that since the 1970's there's been a 30 percent loss in biodiversity on average, and that the loss in tropical species is twice as high. Wetlands, forests, reefs, and savannahs are all falling victim to human encroachment.
But as world population grows and consumption levels expand, it will get harder to ignore humanity's impact on planetary resources. The excessive demands that we are putting on the planet will inevitably lead to acute water shortages, a chronic food crisis, and rising prices for energy, metals, and minerals. Indeed, it's already happening. In the last five years, we already endured two global food crises, and we're just another bout of severe weather away from a third one. And soon, if not already, rising prices for fuel, minerals and metals will begin to act as a break on the world's economic accelerator. High oil prices almost certainly contributed to the severity of the Great Recession, and they have, in all likelihood, slowed the pace of recovery.
Challenges abound. In the next few decades, severe water scarcity in the Middle East and some parts of Asia could lead to humanitarian crises and chronic hardship, and set back our efforts to eradicate hunger and severe poverty. And then there's the impact of climate change. A growing number of scientists believe that the increased incidence of drought and flooding that we are seeing is attributable to the accumulating levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. If so, the worst is yet to come.
According to the Living Planet report, humanity has been in ecological "overshoot" for over three decades. The human trajectory of expanding population and rising consumption is, by almost any measure, unsustainable.
No one should diminish the importance of what happens to the Euro, the student loan crisis, or our current economic malaise, but long after these problems are solved we will still be wrestling with the challenges posed by an overcrowded, over-exploited, over-heated, over-consuming world. Those challenges are not insurmountable. Not yet. There are many relatively inexpensive steps that can be taken to reduce carbon emissions, preserve biodiversity, conserve water, boost food production, and prevent unwanted pregnancies. Time, however, is running short, our options are narrowing, and the cost of delay is rising.
Barbara Ehrenreich: Preying on the Poor
Jennifer Mishory and Nicholas Kelly: $1,000,000,000,000: How Did We Get Here?
May 15th, 2012 in Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
(Phys.org) -- Is Earth really a sort of giant living organism as the Gaia hypothesis predicts? A new discovery made at the University of Maryland may provide a key to answering this question. This key of sulfur could allow scientists to unlock heretofore hidden interactions between ocean organisms, atmosphere, and land -- interactions that might provide evidence supporting this famous theory.
The Gaia hypothesis -- first articulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s -- holds that Earth's physical and biological processes are inextricably connected to form a self-regulating, essentially sentient, system.
http://phys.org/print256321026.html
http://tinyurl.com/7ft4ub6
http://www.go3project.com/network2/index.php/blogs/1836/172/the-amazon-rain-forest
Or, you could say that we're in for something of a rough ride as the mean temperature increases very substantially, disrupting long-established patterns of rainfall, irrigation, residential real estate, and the like.
There are just too many of us.
Anyone except a true moral monster (such as Ayn Rand, who was, as far as I can tell, a psychopath as well as being a hypocrite) would prefer the latter.
We have not evolved to react to next year's maybes, no matter how terrifying we know them to be. We just do not have the collective instinct to deal with it, so we will go on till the inevitable crash happens; those of us who are left will start over, but at a much reduced standard of living. We won't like it, but without oil, we will have no choice to accept what our future delivers.
http://www.yourmedievalfuture.com/
Since there are precious few signs of compassion in the fat cat population that should inspire fear in all the rest of us.
heh
larouchepac.com/node/21005
By Limari Navarrete-Bedford. With the global financial system at a historic moment of total collapse, only depopulation of the most efficient means is the way a
A Tour of NAWAPA - LaRouchePAC
larouchepac.com/node/15628
Drawing heavily from our special report, "NAWAPA XXI: Water & Agriculture" goes through the amount water that will be transferred to the Southwestern U.S. and its
That, and the Queen of England is a drug dealer!
May 1st, 2012 Why this is so of course is extremely pertinent to the case of “REGINA VERSUS TOWNSEND” and it is my personal contention that “the queen” is pissed big time with Harry James Townsend because Mr. Townsend, many years ago, also came to the realization that something was sorely amiss with Canada’s justice system and had set out to educate the Canadian public about whathttp://radicalpress.com/
a supremely farcical foundation our whole
judiciary is based upon.
Romney wants "everyone" to be rich. That means eliminating the poor. How do you think he wants to accomplish that.........?
The world's surface is mostly water. We'll find a cost effective engineering solution. For now, let's start building more dams and water pipelines.
Mitigation - the efforts at reducing or avoiding future levels of greenhouse gasses, therefore avoiding the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Assumes a world-wide cooperation toward economic and life-style changes.
Adaptation - efforts toward making a place or population less at danger from the effects of climate change. Assumes that mitigation will not be sufficient.
GCC - Previously 'Global Warming', then the more resultant phrase, 'Global Climate Change'. Now being replaced by forward-thinking scientists as 'Global Climate Chaos'. Based on the slowly emerging realization that the climate change and its effects aren't and won't be linear in nature, but rather random, non-traditional, 'unusual, abnormal, unprecedented', etc. Assumes that climate changes and their effects are somewhat resistant to prediction and therefore, resultantly catastrophic.
Climate Refugees - those populations who are displaced by insistent change such as sea level rise. Eighty percent of the nation of Bangladesh, along with its millions of citizens, is less than 8 feet above current sea level. The wealthy nations of the world realize their exposure; the Clinton administration's GCC official, Eileen Clausen summed up their agenda as she offered a pittance to help with GCC preparations in India, "We want to help you stay where you are." (Good luck with that...)
Has your city, township or community asked themselves the 'climate question'? That is, how will climate change affect you, your roads, your food supply, your water sources, etc.