Posted on 06/08/2011 8:07:50 AM PDT by Borges
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”
Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I don’t know who I’m quoting, but I read last week (I think it was in the FR) that the population of our planet (6,000,000,000?) could live as comfortably in the state of Texas as New Yorkers do in New York City.
Plenty of food is easily producible with modern farming science.
What’s the problem, Liberals? You don’t like what God said to go out and multiply and “fill the whole the earth”? Too bad about you pagans.
Reading the Times is sometimes like listening to an oldies station. I remember reading this chestnut when I was in second grade and it was already old then.
Yeah, but I don't want none of that desert and swampland stuff. Give me the good stuff and with a mall and super market close by. And a good air-conditioned car to get there.
Every few months I run some variant of those statistics. Amuses me. Next one I’m looking for involves finding the output of high-efficiency farms vs. world food needs, to determine how little space is really needed for farming. (Some 15M sq km are now in use for farming, but most of that seems low-tech and relatively low-output.)
I agree that food production is a fascinating factor in these population discussions, and that very little actual (factual) data is ever used. I understand that Auburn University and Texas A&M have entire Ag departments and graduate programs that are concerned with this subject, but I haven’t investigated.
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