Malthus failed to foresee the Industrial Revolution, and the ways mass production allowed more people to live longer. Ehrlich's calculations missed the coming of the "green revolution," which ac celerated food production ahead of the population curve.
The Anthropocene Age, which began with the Industrial Revolution, marks the first geologic epoch in which the activities of one species-we humans-inexorably degrade the handful of global systems that support life on earth.
The Anthropocene represents systems in collision. Human systems for construction, energy, transportation, industry, and commerce daily attack the operation of natural systems like the nitrogen and carbon cycles, the rich dynamics of ecosystems, the availability of usable water, and the like. What's more, within the last fifty years this onslaught has undergone what scientists call the "great acceleration," with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, among other indicators of coming systems crises, increasing at an ever-greater rate.
The human planetary footprint, Ehrlich saw, is a product of three forces: what each of us consumes, how many of us there are, and the methods we deploy to get the stuff we consume. Using those three measures, the United Kingdom's Royal Society tried to estimate the earth's carrying capacity for humanity-the maxi mum number of people the earth can support without a collapse in the systems that support life. Their conclusion: it depends.
The biggest unknown in the forecast was improvements in technology. China, for instance, worryingly expanded its capacity for generating electricity from coal-and more recently increased
its u.s,e of solar and wind energy at a rapid rate. Net result: the ratio of C0emitted relative to economic output in China has plummeted by around 70 percent over the last thirty years (although these numbers hide the continuing steep growth in coal-burning power plants in "the world's factory").In short, technological rev olutions may save us from ourselves, letting us use resources in ways that protect the planet's vital life-support systems-if we can find methods that don't just create new problems or conceal old ones.
Malthus failed to foresee the Industrial Revolution, and the ways mass production allowed more people to live longer. Ehrlich's calculations missed the coming of the "green revolution," which ac celerated food production ahead of the population curve.
The Anthropocene Age, which began with the Industrial Revolution, marks the first geologic epoch in which the activities of one species-we humans-inexorably degrade the handful of global systems that support life on earth.
The Anthropocene represents systems in collision. Human systems for construction, energy, transportation, industry, and commerce daily attack the operation of natural systems like the nitrogen and carbon cycles, the rich dynamics of ecosystems, the availability of usable water, and the like. What's more, within the last fifty years this onslaught has undergone what scientists call the "great acceleration," with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, among other indicators of coming systems crises, increasing at an ever-greater rate.
The human planetary footprint, Ehrlich saw, is a product of three forces: what each of us consumes, how many of us there are, and the methods we deploy to get the stuff we consume. Using those three measures, the United Kingdom's Royal Society tried to estimate the earth's carrying capacity for humanity-the maxi mum number of people the earth can support without a collapse in the systems that support life. Their conclusion: it depends.
The biggest unknown in the forecast was improvements in technology. China, for instance, worryingly expanded its capacity for generating electricity from coal-and more recently increased
its u.s,e of solar and wind energy at a rapid rate. Net result: the ratio of C0emitted relative to economic output in China has plummeted by around 70 percent over the last thirty years (although these numbers hide the continuing steep growth in coal-burning power plants in "the world's factory").In short, technological rev olutions may save us from ourselves, letting us use resources in ways that protect the planet's vital life-support systems-if we can find methods that don't just create new problems or conceal old ones.
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