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Humans Are Stripping The Earth Bare Through Overconsumption
By Life-Musings.com | March 30, 2009
Human beings and modern civilization are plundering nature at a rate never seen before. If current trends were to go on, we will need the natural resources provided by two Earths by the year 2050. And that’s assuming we have not exhausted Earth’s resources by then. This and other details were revealed by a report published by the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Footprint Network, according to MSNBC in Oct 2006.
Has trends changed since then? Unlikely. If anything, with countries like China and India exploding with economic growth, it is more than likely that our overuse of resources is worsening, rather than getting better.
“For more than 20 years we have exceeded the Earth’s ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path. If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us,” said WWF Director-General James Leape, when releasing the 2006 Living Planet Report.
Some bits of information from the report:
* “Humanity’s footprint has more than tripled between 1961 and 2003″.
* The world’s population has ballooned from 3 billion in 1960 to 6.5 billion. Yet, consumption has outpaced even that.
* In 2003, mankind’s ecological footprint, in other words how much we stressed nature, was 25% higher than Earth’s yearly ability to provide for us. This includes food, energy, and the processing and recycling of human waste.
* “People are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources.”
* An index was used to track 1,300 vertebrate animal species, which include amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles, and it found that most animal populations had decreased by about 30%, due to various factors, such as loss of their natural habitats.
* Using its own criteria, the report said that Cuba was the only country which was able to attain a high level of development (which included good education and health systems) without using more resources than what would be sustainable.
Modern life, modern civilization, and modern living - are they sustainable? The answer is a quite obvious and resounding “no!” By that fact alone, it is clear that life as we know it today will not carry on for too long. Either we have to evolve and adapt, and make some drastic changes to the way we use resources, or we are consuming our way into oblivion.
As though we needed more wake-up calls.
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Topics: All Life Musings, Man and Animals, Man and the Environment, Modern Life, Science |