It was clear long ago to people paying attention.
Ecological Overshoot
- Thread starter Ricter
- Start date
It was clear long ago to people paying attention.
We blame corporations, but it's really just shareholders, even passive, clueless shareholders, that ultimately drive the whole process of ecological destruction--through the imperative of growth. The whole concept of getting a return on your investment, particularly if you are not yourself engaged in that enterprise, gives rise to a class who do no work today but still expect to be fed. People who think like this are de facto parasites, even if they're just mindlessly, innocently, playing by the rules. For that reason I don't blame them.
Mining the Planet to Death: The Dirty Truth About Clean Technologies
Foto:
[M]: Hedi Xandt; SABarton / Getty Images / DER SPIEGEL
Mining the Planet to Death The Dirty Truth About Clean Technologies
The poor South is being exploited so that the rich North can transition to environmental sustainability. Entire swaths of land are being destroyed to secure the resources needed to produce wind turbines and solar cells. Are there alternatives?
By Jens Glüsing, Simon Hage, Alexander Jung, Nils Klawitter und Stefan Schultz
04.11.2021, 11.44 Uhr
There’s a dirty secret hidden in every wind turbine. They may convert moving air cleanly and efficiently into electricity, but few know much about what they are made of. Much of the material inside wind turbines are the product of brutal encroachments on our natural world.
Each unit requires cement, sand, steel, zinc and aluminum. And tons of copper: for the generator, for the gearbox, for the transformer station and for the endless strands of cable. Around 67 tons of copper can be found in a medium-sized offshore turbine. To extract this amount of copper, miners have to move almost 50,000 tons of earth and rock, around five times the weight of the Eiffel Tower. The ore is shredded, ground, watered and leached. The bottom line: a lot of nature destroyed for a little bit of green power.
A visit to the Los Pelambres mine in northern Chile provides a clear grasp of the dimensions involved. It is home to one of the world’s largest copper deposits, a giant gray crater at an altitude of 3,600 meters (11,800 feet). The earth here is full of metalliferous ore. Just under 2 percent of the world’s copper production comes from this single pit.
Dump trucks, 3,500-horsepower strong, transport multi-ton loads down the terrace roads that line the mine. The boulders are transported by conveyor belt almost 13 kilometers (8 miles) into the valley, where the copper is extracted from the rock. This processing requires huge amounts of electricity and water, a particularly precious commodity in this arid region.
The project is operated by Antofagasta, a London-based Chilean mining corporation that owns 60 percent of the mine. The company built a hydroelectric plant in 2013, almost exclusively to supply electricity to Los Pelambres. Farmers protested against it, and have blamed the project for water shortages in the region.
Now, though, the mine is slated to grow even larger. The company is pumping additional volumes of desalinated seawater from the Pacific coast across the country. Company executives hope this will enable them to continue operating the mine for a few more years. Global demand for copper, after all, is expected to grow immensely, for power cables and electric motors. And for wind turbines.
“We are using resources of the future to pay for the present.”
Resources researcher Mathis Wackernagel
There are great hopes that the green technology can be used to help save the climate, but that rescue also entails stripping the planet of precious resources. And this is the paradox behind what is currently the most important project of the industrialized world: the global energy transition. The dilemma...
More...
Foto:
[M]: Hedi Xandt; SABarton / Getty Images / DER SPIEGEL
Mining the Planet to Death The Dirty Truth About Clean Technologies
The poor South is being exploited so that the rich North can transition to environmental sustainability. Entire swaths of land are being destroyed to secure the resources needed to produce wind turbines and solar cells. Are there alternatives?
By Jens Glüsing, Simon Hage, Alexander Jung, Nils Klawitter und Stefan Schultz
04.11.2021, 11.44 Uhr
There’s a dirty secret hidden in every wind turbine. They may convert moving air cleanly and efficiently into electricity, but few know much about what they are made of. Much of the material inside wind turbines are the product of brutal encroachments on our natural world.
Each unit requires cement, sand, steel, zinc and aluminum. And tons of copper: for the generator, for the gearbox, for the transformer station and for the endless strands of cable. Around 67 tons of copper can be found in a medium-sized offshore turbine. To extract this amount of copper, miners have to move almost 50,000 tons of earth and rock, around five times the weight of the Eiffel Tower. The ore is shredded, ground, watered and leached. The bottom line: a lot of nature destroyed for a little bit of green power.
A visit to the Los Pelambres mine in northern Chile provides a clear grasp of the dimensions involved. It is home to one of the world’s largest copper deposits, a giant gray crater at an altitude of 3,600 meters (11,800 feet). The earth here is full of metalliferous ore. Just under 2 percent of the world’s copper production comes from this single pit.
Dump trucks, 3,500-horsepower strong, transport multi-ton loads down the terrace roads that line the mine. The boulders are transported by conveyor belt almost 13 kilometers (8 miles) into the valley, where the copper is extracted from the rock. This processing requires huge amounts of electricity and water, a particularly precious commodity in this arid region.
The project is operated by Antofagasta, a London-based Chilean mining corporation that owns 60 percent of the mine. The company built a hydroelectric plant in 2013, almost exclusively to supply electricity to Los Pelambres. Farmers protested against it, and have blamed the project for water shortages in the region.
Now, though, the mine is slated to grow even larger. The company is pumping additional volumes of desalinated seawater from the Pacific coast across the country. Company executives hope this will enable them to continue operating the mine for a few more years. Global demand for copper, after all, is expected to grow immensely, for power cables and electric motors. And for wind turbines.
“We are using resources of the future to pay for the present.”
Resources researcher Mathis Wackernagel
There are great hopes that the green technology can be used to help save the climate, but that rescue also entails stripping the planet of precious resources. And this is the paradox behind what is currently the most important project of the industrialized world: the global energy transition. The dilemma...
More...
"This is Just the Beginning of the Greatest Catastrophe in Human History"
umair haque
Jun 18
9 min read
Heat. Flood. Fire. Drought. War. Inflation. Welcome to the Age of Extinction.
Our Planet is Changing in Profound, Terrifying, and Visible Ways Now. But We’re Still in Denial About What It Means.
Image Credit: Image Credit
Let me share a story with you.
It comes from a friend. A successful enough guy. Born and raised — back and forth — between the Indian Subcontinent and the West. Now he’s settled in the West, a doctor, with a family of his own.
He said to me: “Man — you know, I didn’t take it seriously. What you’ve been writing about lately. We” — meaning he and some of my old friends — “even used to make fun of it sometimes. Alarmist. LOL. But, you know. Something happened. And now…”
I frowned. And listened.
My friend has a niece. His sister’s daughter. They still live in the Indian Subcontinent, in an ancient city of artists and poets, of music and literature. A beautiful and learned place. She’s all of five years old — a bright and curious and intelligent little girl. An observant one.
One day, recently — last week — the niece asked her mother a question. A question she began to ask over and over.
“Mommy, where’s the monster?”
At first, her mom dismissed the question. Kids will be kids. They ask all kinds of strange and funny and sometimes jarring questions.
But the daughter kept asking. She’d frown, scrunch up her little face. There was something happening in her tiny world which was out of place. She didn’t understand. Something was wrong. Unnatural. And she needed her mommy, her rock, her guiding light, to give her an explanation. So she, in the determined way little kids of a certain kind can be, wouldn’t take silence or refusal or dismissal or denial for an answer.
Again and again. “Mommy, where’s the monster?” This went on for a whole week, apparently.
And finally, wondering if something was really wrong with her daughter, her mother, my friend’s sister, asked, in a combination of exasperation and concern: “Darling, there’s no monster! Monsters aren’t real. You know that! Everything’s fine. What makes you think there’s a monster? What monster?”
The little girl replied. And I guarantee that her answer is going to suddenly chill you to the bone, just like it did me, and my friend.
“The monster that’s killing all the birds, mommy.”
The monster that’s killing all the birds.
Suddenly, her mother understood. And you did, too, I bet. For weeks, there’d been a heatwave. An abnormal one. A killing one. Temperatures had risen to 50 degrees Celsius, or 122º Fahrenheit. Birds had just dropped dead, falling from the skies.
The little girl, being observant, curious, determined — and a little kid — had drawn the only conclusion she could.
There was a monster. Out there in the world. Just killing things. Making birds fall dead from the sky. Leaving them just littering the streets and balconies and roofs of the ancient city.
The mother, I’m told, suddenly wanted to cry. But she didn’t. She explained, as best she could, to the little girl, the story of our world, planet, how it’s changing.
The birds are dying because the heat is killing them. They can’t fly anymore. They’re thirsty. They can’t breathe.
Me? When I heard that story? I felt many things. I felt heartbroken. A certain grief rushed through me. I felt angry. Disappointed. This is the world our children are inheriting. They have to imagine monsters just to make sense of it.
But the little girl was right. There is a monster stalking her little world. The monster’s name is extinction.
I share that story with you because I find it a perfect summary of the plight we now face, as a civilization, as humanity, as fellow travelers on this voyage of life. I have never, ever heard a better summation of this moment in history than that the tale I just told you. Why?
It’s not just the Indian Subcontinent. In Spain, birds are dying too, falling from the sky, being literally cooked alive. Spain is 4500 miles away from Delhi. In the Arctic, the ice sheets are melting at levels that scientists call catastrophic and off the charts. In the oceans, the currents appear to be slowing. In London, the temperatures were tropically hot — and fires broke out over the city. Fires which ravage continents every summer now. In the American West, water is running out, as reservoirs and rivers run dry.
Need I go on?
This is where we are. And it’s different now. Before, we used to maybe if we were thoughtful people learn about a thing called “climate change.” It was called “climate change” because that term was invented by a hard right lobbyist, to replace the more accurate “global warming.” Ah, climate change. That doesn’t even sound threatening! Why worry? Maybe it’s not happening at all, our societies began to debate — and hence, even places like Australia elected heads of state who deniedit.
In those days — not so long ago, the 2000s, the 2010s — this Event was not an event yet, really. It was an abstraction, mostly. Climate change — LOL — it’ll happen one day. But right now? I’ve got my video games and my celebrities and my consumerist dreams to focus on. Who cares! It wasn’t real. Not yet. It was happening, sure — but people couldn’t really experience it much yet, except maybe in remote places.
As a civilization we had not experienced the Event yet. So, comfortable in our ignorance, we called it “climate change,” and went on about our daily lives, making absolutely no preparations for it.
But now — fast forward just a handful of years — and something is happening. Human beings are now beginning to experience the Event. It’s not just “undeniable” — it’s undeniable because it’s all around us. In the record-breaking heatwave, the fires, the droughts, the shortages, the inflation. The birds falling dead from the sky.
Now we are beginning to experience The Event as a lived reality. Suddenly. Extinction is here.
This realization is happening in different ways. Each more disturbing than the last. Suddenly, Europe is realizing that, no, “climate change” isn’t just about utopian architecture or treaties. It’s a killing kind of heat that cities and towns aren’t prepared for. Suddenly, America is beginning to wonder: what happens when the water runs out? When the power grid blacks out? How does civilization survive? Suddenly, people in the South — places like the Indian Subcontinent — are wondering: my god, if it’s this hot now, how much hotter will it be in five years? Where will we go? Should we move north, to the mountains? Just abandon the old beautiful city of artists and poets? What happens to it?
We are beginning to live inside The Event.
And we are not ready yet to do so.
Why did my friends’ niece have to ask her mother if there was a monster? Because nobody had taught her about The Event. Sure, she learns about “climate change.” She goes to a fine school. But we don’t teach anyone about the realities of The Event, from adults to kids, because in our global culture, in our way of thinking, there is no real understanding of what this is.
We do not teach people what The Event is. What is it? This is Extinction.
It isn’t just “climate change.” Climate change was deliberately designed to be a neutral term, which hid the impacts of The Event. What happens when the temperature suddenly rises? It’s happened over and over again in history — but on this scale, only five previous times. And each time, the result has been extinction.
“Climate change” is a profoundly inadequate way to describe all this. My friend’s niece of course knew about it. She understood that yes, temperatures were rising. But nobody had taught her what it really means. That ecologies were to begin collapsing. That ecosystems would have their hearts ripped out. Beings of all kinds would just begin to die. And as they did, our systems would fail, and our cities become uninhabitable, at least many of them.
Nobody had taught her that. Maybe it’s too much to teach kids. But the alternative? Shall we just go on pretending with them this fairy tale that no, the planet isn’t dying? They’re going to notice anyways.
In this story, you can see the problem we face in crystal clear, painful detail.
Our civilization is still in denial. About what it now faces. What is now being experienced, suddenly, as a lived reality — not some kind of abstraction anymore that can be safely ignored, in favor of the latest comic book movie or Instafluencer. Now we are beginning to live inside The Event.
Every day, more and more of us are living inside the Event. We are not existing outside it anymore, at the safe, comfortable arms distance remove. Before, it was a handful of people — living next to burning forests, or trapped by rising seas. Now? It’s London, a burning Spain, a flooded Yellowstone, a drought-stricken American West, a scorched Indian Subcontinent, an Australia and Canada ravaged by megafires.
More and more of us are living inside The Event. And we are beginning to suddenly, in horror, realize what it really means. It’s this hot now? Wait, we’re running out of water now? The electricity grids are barely working already? Wait, there are shortages of basics from tampons to baby formula now? My God. What about three years? Five? Ten?
Mommy, where’s the monster?
We’re all beginning to ask the same question my friend’s niece did.
And the answer to that question goes like this. There is a monster. Its name is extinction. Human beings are now living inside an event which has only happened five times in deep history, and never since their kind walked the earth. Extinction.
It is coming as a shock to us because those who warned of it were dismissed and attacked, sometimes even criminalized, certainly ignored. Hence, we failed so badly at preparing for it that we didn’t. We didn’t even teach our kids what they were going to experience. We didn’t harden our infrastructure and rebuild our cities, we didn’t alter our economies, we didn’t change a single social norm, we didn’t make a cultural effort to tell the story which was to define history forevermore and cleave it in two. BE, AE. Before and after Extinction.
We are still in denial about the Event. And yet it’s beginning to happen everywhere, all around us. Even a child can see it. But what does it say when adults are the ones desperately trying to ignore it, and hope it will magically go away — and children are the ones noticing that it isn’t? It is a demonstration of how badly we have failed, my friends, so far. And every day that we keep failing, at all these tasks — altering our economies, changing our norms, educating our kids, transforming our cities, hardening our infrastructure, culturally telling the story, making one last ditch effort to save what we can, of life on this planet, civilization, and ourselves — the worse it will get.
And it will get much worse much faster than we can understand now, because, well, so far, we’ve been in denial. If I asked you even five years ago, “Do you think birds will be dropping dead from the skies because the planet will be too hot for them to survive?” you would have laughed at me, and called me an alarmist. That’s exactly what did happen to those of us who warned. Who’s laughing now? Except the psychopathic billionaires who hope to make a killing from killing? Anyone?
I’m not. I’m horrified. And you should be too. Because this is not a joke. It’s not a warning anymore. It’s not a prediction.
You are beginning to live inside The Event. The greatest one in human history. All of it, so far. And the most terrible one, too. The one which those left of us, centuries from now, will remember as a kind of Holocaust, as history’s great cleaving point. When humanity either grew up into maturity, responsibility, truth, grace, compassion, or perished, in stupidity, ignorance, greed, and hate.
The stakes are these. Saving what we can, of life, the planet, ourselves, and civilization. As fast as we can, as much as we can, as desperately as we can. Or more of this, faster.
This is Extinction. Do we get it yet?
Umair
June 2022
umair haque
Jun 18
9 min read
Heat. Flood. Fire. Drought. War. Inflation. Welcome to the Age of Extinction.
Our Planet is Changing in Profound, Terrifying, and Visible Ways Now. But We’re Still in Denial About What It Means.
Image Credit: Image Credit
Let me share a story with you.
It comes from a friend. A successful enough guy. Born and raised — back and forth — between the Indian Subcontinent and the West. Now he’s settled in the West, a doctor, with a family of his own.
He said to me: “Man — you know, I didn’t take it seriously. What you’ve been writing about lately. We” — meaning he and some of my old friends — “even used to make fun of it sometimes. Alarmist. LOL. But, you know. Something happened. And now…”
I frowned. And listened.
My friend has a niece. His sister’s daughter. They still live in the Indian Subcontinent, in an ancient city of artists and poets, of music and literature. A beautiful and learned place. She’s all of five years old — a bright and curious and intelligent little girl. An observant one.
One day, recently — last week — the niece asked her mother a question. A question she began to ask over and over.
“Mommy, where’s the monster?”
At first, her mom dismissed the question. Kids will be kids. They ask all kinds of strange and funny and sometimes jarring questions.
But the daughter kept asking. She’d frown, scrunch up her little face. There was something happening in her tiny world which was out of place. She didn’t understand. Something was wrong. Unnatural. And she needed her mommy, her rock, her guiding light, to give her an explanation. So she, in the determined way little kids of a certain kind can be, wouldn’t take silence or refusal or dismissal or denial for an answer.
Again and again. “Mommy, where’s the monster?” This went on for a whole week, apparently.
And finally, wondering if something was really wrong with her daughter, her mother, my friend’s sister, asked, in a combination of exasperation and concern: “Darling, there’s no monster! Monsters aren’t real. You know that! Everything’s fine. What makes you think there’s a monster? What monster?”
The little girl replied. And I guarantee that her answer is going to suddenly chill you to the bone, just like it did me, and my friend.
“The monster that’s killing all the birds, mommy.”
The monster that’s killing all the birds.
Suddenly, her mother understood. And you did, too, I bet. For weeks, there’d been a heatwave. An abnormal one. A killing one. Temperatures had risen to 50 degrees Celsius, or 122º Fahrenheit. Birds had just dropped dead, falling from the skies.
The little girl, being observant, curious, determined — and a little kid — had drawn the only conclusion she could.
There was a monster. Out there in the world. Just killing things. Making birds fall dead from the sky. Leaving them just littering the streets and balconies and roofs of the ancient city.
The mother, I’m told, suddenly wanted to cry. But she didn’t. She explained, as best she could, to the little girl, the story of our world, planet, how it’s changing.
The birds are dying because the heat is killing them. They can’t fly anymore. They’re thirsty. They can’t breathe.
Me? When I heard that story? I felt many things. I felt heartbroken. A certain grief rushed through me. I felt angry. Disappointed. This is the world our children are inheriting. They have to imagine monsters just to make sense of it.
But the little girl was right. There is a monster stalking her little world. The monster’s name is extinction.
I share that story with you because I find it a perfect summary of the plight we now face, as a civilization, as humanity, as fellow travelers on this voyage of life. I have never, ever heard a better summation of this moment in history than that the tale I just told you. Why?
It’s not just the Indian Subcontinent. In Spain, birds are dying too, falling from the sky, being literally cooked alive. Spain is 4500 miles away from Delhi. In the Arctic, the ice sheets are melting at levels that scientists call catastrophic and off the charts. In the oceans, the currents appear to be slowing. In London, the temperatures were tropically hot — and fires broke out over the city. Fires which ravage continents every summer now. In the American West, water is running out, as reservoirs and rivers run dry.
Need I go on?
This is where we are. And it’s different now. Before, we used to maybe if we were thoughtful people learn about a thing called “climate change.” It was called “climate change” because that term was invented by a hard right lobbyist, to replace the more accurate “global warming.” Ah, climate change. That doesn’t even sound threatening! Why worry? Maybe it’s not happening at all, our societies began to debate — and hence, even places like Australia elected heads of state who deniedit.
In those days — not so long ago, the 2000s, the 2010s — this Event was not an event yet, really. It was an abstraction, mostly. Climate change — LOL — it’ll happen one day. But right now? I’ve got my video games and my celebrities and my consumerist dreams to focus on. Who cares! It wasn’t real. Not yet. It was happening, sure — but people couldn’t really experience it much yet, except maybe in remote places.
As a civilization we had not experienced the Event yet. So, comfortable in our ignorance, we called it “climate change,” and went on about our daily lives, making absolutely no preparations for it.
But now — fast forward just a handful of years — and something is happening. Human beings are now beginning to experience the Event. It’s not just “undeniable” — it’s undeniable because it’s all around us. In the record-breaking heatwave, the fires, the droughts, the shortages, the inflation. The birds falling dead from the sky.
Now we are beginning to experience The Event as a lived reality. Suddenly. Extinction is here.
This realization is happening in different ways. Each more disturbing than the last. Suddenly, Europe is realizing that, no, “climate change” isn’t just about utopian architecture or treaties. It’s a killing kind of heat that cities and towns aren’t prepared for. Suddenly, America is beginning to wonder: what happens when the water runs out? When the power grid blacks out? How does civilization survive? Suddenly, people in the South — places like the Indian Subcontinent — are wondering: my god, if it’s this hot now, how much hotter will it be in five years? Where will we go? Should we move north, to the mountains? Just abandon the old beautiful city of artists and poets? What happens to it?
We are beginning to live inside The Event.
And we are not ready yet to do so.
Why did my friends’ niece have to ask her mother if there was a monster? Because nobody had taught her about The Event. Sure, she learns about “climate change.” She goes to a fine school. But we don’t teach anyone about the realities of The Event, from adults to kids, because in our global culture, in our way of thinking, there is no real understanding of what this is.
We do not teach people what The Event is. What is it? This is Extinction.
It isn’t just “climate change.” Climate change was deliberately designed to be a neutral term, which hid the impacts of The Event. What happens when the temperature suddenly rises? It’s happened over and over again in history — but on this scale, only five previous times. And each time, the result has been extinction.
“Climate change” is a profoundly inadequate way to describe all this. My friend’s niece of course knew about it. She understood that yes, temperatures were rising. But nobody had taught her what it really means. That ecologies were to begin collapsing. That ecosystems would have their hearts ripped out. Beings of all kinds would just begin to die. And as they did, our systems would fail, and our cities become uninhabitable, at least many of them.
Nobody had taught her that. Maybe it’s too much to teach kids. But the alternative? Shall we just go on pretending with them this fairy tale that no, the planet isn’t dying? They’re going to notice anyways.
In this story, you can see the problem we face in crystal clear, painful detail.
Our civilization is still in denial. About what it now faces. What is now being experienced, suddenly, as a lived reality — not some kind of abstraction anymore that can be safely ignored, in favor of the latest comic book movie or Instafluencer. Now we are beginning to live inside The Event.
Every day, more and more of us are living inside the Event. We are not existing outside it anymore, at the safe, comfortable arms distance remove. Before, it was a handful of people — living next to burning forests, or trapped by rising seas. Now? It’s London, a burning Spain, a flooded Yellowstone, a drought-stricken American West, a scorched Indian Subcontinent, an Australia and Canada ravaged by megafires.
More and more of us are living inside The Event. And we are beginning to suddenly, in horror, realize what it really means. It’s this hot now? Wait, we’re running out of water now? The electricity grids are barely working already? Wait, there are shortages of basics from tampons to baby formula now? My God. What about three years? Five? Ten?
Mommy, where’s the monster?
We’re all beginning to ask the same question my friend’s niece did.
And the answer to that question goes like this. There is a monster. Its name is extinction. Human beings are now living inside an event which has only happened five times in deep history, and never since their kind walked the earth. Extinction.
It is coming as a shock to us because those who warned of it were dismissed and attacked, sometimes even criminalized, certainly ignored. Hence, we failed so badly at preparing for it that we didn’t. We didn’t even teach our kids what they were going to experience. We didn’t harden our infrastructure and rebuild our cities, we didn’t alter our economies, we didn’t change a single social norm, we didn’t make a cultural effort to tell the story which was to define history forevermore and cleave it in two. BE, AE. Before and after Extinction.
We are still in denial about the Event. And yet it’s beginning to happen everywhere, all around us. Even a child can see it. But what does it say when adults are the ones desperately trying to ignore it, and hope it will magically go away — and children are the ones noticing that it isn’t? It is a demonstration of how badly we have failed, my friends, so far. And every day that we keep failing, at all these tasks — altering our economies, changing our norms, educating our kids, transforming our cities, hardening our infrastructure, culturally telling the story, making one last ditch effort to save what we can, of life on this planet, civilization, and ourselves — the worse it will get.
And it will get much worse much faster than we can understand now, because, well, so far, we’ve been in denial. If I asked you even five years ago, “Do you think birds will be dropping dead from the skies because the planet will be too hot for them to survive?” you would have laughed at me, and called me an alarmist. That’s exactly what did happen to those of us who warned. Who’s laughing now? Except the psychopathic billionaires who hope to make a killing from killing? Anyone?
I’m not. I’m horrified. And you should be too. Because this is not a joke. It’s not a warning anymore. It’s not a prediction.
You are beginning to live inside The Event. The greatest one in human history. All of it, so far. And the most terrible one, too. The one which those left of us, centuries from now, will remember as a kind of Holocaust, as history’s great cleaving point. When humanity either grew up into maturity, responsibility, truth, grace, compassion, or perished, in stupidity, ignorance, greed, and hate.
The stakes are these. Saving what we can, of life, the planet, ourselves, and civilization. As fast as we can, as much as we can, as desperately as we can. Or more of this, faster.
This is Extinction. Do we get it yet?
Umair
June 2022
A couple of years old, sadly even worse now, but good to keep in mind when considering the human enterprise's ecological footprint and the odds of mankind's sustainability and survival.
Human-made materials now outweigh Earth's entire biomass – study
Production of concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt greater than mass of living matter on planet, paper says
London skyline: The dominant categories in the analysis were human-made mass in the form of buildings and infrastructure, composed of concrete, aggregates, bricks and asphalt. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
Sandra Laville Environment correspondent
The amount of plastic alone is greater in mass than all land animals and marine creatures combined, the study estimates.
While human beings might believe in “the immensity of the globe and the seeming infinity of the natural world”, the researchers say they wanted to provide an objective and rigorous measure of the reality of the balance between man and nature.
Their research shows that human activity including production of concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt has brought the world to a crossover point where human-made mass – driven mostly by enhanced consumption and urban development – exceeds the overall living biomass on Earth.
On average, every person in the world is responsible for the creation of human-made matter equal to more than their bodyweight each week, the paper published in Nature says.
The research found that the stamp of humanity has been increasing in size rapidly since the beginning of the 20th century, doubling every 20 years.
The researchers support a proposal to name the current epoch as Anthropocene, reflecting the abrupt and considerable impact of human activity.
Ron Milo, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues examined changes in global biomass and human-made mass from 1900 to the present day. They calculated dry weight estimates, excluding water. Anthropogenic mass is defined as the mass embedded in inanimate solid objects made by humans and does not include waste.
The dominant categories in the analysis were human-made mass in the form of buildings and infrastructure, composed of concrete, aggregates, bricks and asphalt. As for global biomass, the majority is accounted for by trees and shrubs.
They found that at the beginning of the 20th century, the mass of human-produced objects was equal to about 3% of the world’s total biomass. But in 2020, human-made mass has reached about 1.1 teratonnes, exceeding overall global biomass.
As human-made mass has increased, so too has the impact on plant biomass. “Since the first agricultural revolution, humanity has roughly halved the mass of plants,” the authors write. “While modern agriculture utilises an increasing land area for growing crops, the total mass of domesticated crops is vastly outweighed by the loss of plant mass resulting from deforestation, forest management and other land-use changes. These trends in global biomass have affected the carbon cycle and human health.”
Over the decades there are rises and dips in human impact, including sharp increases after the switch in the 1950s from bricks to concrete and the use of asphalt for pavements in the 1960s.
“Shifts in total anthropogenic mass are tied to global events such as world wars and major economic crises,” the paper says. Most notably, there are continuous increases in human-made mass of more than 5% per year from the period immediately following the second world war, which became known as the “great acceleration” and was characterised by enhanced consumption and urban development.
Conversely, during times of downturn the weight of the human footprint decreases. There are key dips seen during the Great Depression and the 1979 oil crash.
“The face of Earth in the 21st century is affected in an unprecedented manner by the activities of humanity and the production and accumulation of human-made objects,” the researchers say.
Since 1900 overall biomass has decreased slightly, whereas human-made mass has increased rapidly to a production rate of more than 30 gigatonnes (30,000,000,000 tonnes) per year. If human production continues at this rate, the weight of our impact will exceed 3 teratonnes by 2040.
“This study joins recent efforts to quantify and evaluate the scale and impact of human activities on our planet,” the paper says. “The impacts of these activities have been so abrupt and considerable that it has been proposed that the current geological epoch be renamed the Anthropocene. Our study rigorously and quantitatively substantiates this proposal.”
This article was amended on 31 December 2020. An earlier version referred to the majority of global biomass being accounted for by “plants and shrubs'”; this has been amended to trees and shrubs.
Human-made materials now outweigh Earth's entire biomass – study
Production of concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt greater than mass of living matter on planet, paper says
London skyline: The dominant categories in the analysis were human-made mass in the form of buildings and infrastructure, composed of concrete, aggregates, bricks and asphalt. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
Sandra Laville Environment correspondent
The amount of plastic alone is greater in mass than all land animals and marine creatures combined, the study estimates.
While human beings might believe in “the immensity of the globe and the seeming infinity of the natural world”, the researchers say they wanted to provide an objective and rigorous measure of the reality of the balance between man and nature.
Their research shows that human activity including production of concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt has brought the world to a crossover point where human-made mass – driven mostly by enhanced consumption and urban development – exceeds the overall living biomass on Earth.
On average, every person in the world is responsible for the creation of human-made matter equal to more than their bodyweight each week, the paper published in Nature says.
The research found that the stamp of humanity has been increasing in size rapidly since the beginning of the 20th century, doubling every 20 years.
The researchers support a proposal to name the current epoch as Anthropocene, reflecting the abrupt and considerable impact of human activity.
Ron Milo, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues examined changes in global biomass and human-made mass from 1900 to the present day. They calculated dry weight estimates, excluding water. Anthropogenic mass is defined as the mass embedded in inanimate solid objects made by humans and does not include waste.
The dominant categories in the analysis were human-made mass in the form of buildings and infrastructure, composed of concrete, aggregates, bricks and asphalt. As for global biomass, the majority is accounted for by trees and shrubs.
They found that at the beginning of the 20th century, the mass of human-produced objects was equal to about 3% of the world’s total biomass. But in 2020, human-made mass has reached about 1.1 teratonnes, exceeding overall global biomass.
As human-made mass has increased, so too has the impact on plant biomass. “Since the first agricultural revolution, humanity has roughly halved the mass of plants,” the authors write. “While modern agriculture utilises an increasing land area for growing crops, the total mass of domesticated crops is vastly outweighed by the loss of plant mass resulting from deforestation, forest management and other land-use changes. These trends in global biomass have affected the carbon cycle and human health.”
Over the decades there are rises and dips in human impact, including sharp increases after the switch in the 1950s from bricks to concrete and the use of asphalt for pavements in the 1960s.
“Shifts in total anthropogenic mass are tied to global events such as world wars and major economic crises,” the paper says. Most notably, there are continuous increases in human-made mass of more than 5% per year from the period immediately following the second world war, which became known as the “great acceleration” and was characterised by enhanced consumption and urban development.
Conversely, during times of downturn the weight of the human footprint decreases. There are key dips seen during the Great Depression and the 1979 oil crash.
“The face of Earth in the 21st century is affected in an unprecedented manner by the activities of humanity and the production and accumulation of human-made objects,” the researchers say.
Since 1900 overall biomass has decreased slightly, whereas human-made mass has increased rapidly to a production rate of more than 30 gigatonnes (30,000,000,000 tonnes) per year. If human production continues at this rate, the weight of our impact will exceed 3 teratonnes by 2040.
“This study joins recent efforts to quantify and evaluate the scale and impact of human activities on our planet,” the paper says. “The impacts of these activities have been so abrupt and considerable that it has been proposed that the current geological epoch be renamed the Anthropocene. Our study rigorously and quantitatively substantiates this proposal.”
This article was amended on 31 December 2020. An earlier version referred to the majority of global biomass being accounted for by “plants and shrubs'”; this has been amended to trees and shrubs.
Does this mean that the Earth might tip over??!!A couple of years old, sadly even worse now, but good to keep in mind when considering the human enterprise's ecological footprint and the odds of mankind's sustainability and survival.
Human-made materials now outweigh Earth's entire biomass – study
Production of concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt greater than mass of living matter on planet, paper says
London skyline: The dominant categories in the analysis were human-made mass in the form of buildings and infrastructure, composed of concrete, aggregates, bricks and asphalt. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
Sandra Laville Environment correspondent
The amount of plastic alone is greater in mass than all land animals and marine creatures combined, the study estimates.
While human beings might believe in “the immensity of the globe and the seeming infinity of the natural world”, the researchers say they wanted to provide an objective and rigorous measure of the reality of the balance between man and nature.
Their research shows that human activity including production of concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt has brought the world to a crossover point where human-made mass – driven mostly by enhanced consumption and urban development – exceeds the overall living biomass on Earth.
On average, every person in the world is responsible for the creation of human-made matter equal to more than their bodyweight each week, the paper published in Nature says.
The research found that the stamp of humanity has been increasing in size rapidly since the beginning of the 20th century, doubling every 20 years.
The researchers support a proposal to name the current epoch as Anthropocene, reflecting the abrupt and considerable impact of human activity.
Ron Milo, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues examined changes in global biomass and human-made mass from 1900 to the present day. They calculated dry weight estimates, excluding water. Anthropogenic mass is defined as the mass embedded in inanimate solid objects made by humans and does not include waste.
The dominant categories in the analysis were human-made mass in the form of buildings and infrastructure, composed of concrete, aggregates, bricks and asphalt. As for global biomass, the majority is accounted for by trees and shrubs.
They found that at the beginning of the 20th century, the mass of human-produced objects was equal to about 3% of the world’s total biomass. But in 2020, human-made mass has reached about 1.1 teratonnes, exceeding overall global biomass.
As human-made mass has increased, so too has the impact on plant biomass. “Since the first agricultural revolution, humanity has roughly halved the mass of plants,” the authors write. “While modern agriculture utilises an increasing land area for growing crops, the total mass of domesticated crops is vastly outweighed by the loss of plant mass resulting from deforestation, forest management and other land-use changes. These trends in global biomass have affected the carbon cycle and human health.”
Over the decades there are rises and dips in human impact, including sharp increases after the switch in the 1950s from bricks to concrete and the use of asphalt for pavements in the 1960s.
“Shifts in total anthropogenic mass are tied to global events such as world wars and major economic crises,” the paper says. Most notably, there are continuous increases in human-made mass of more than 5% per year from the period immediately following the second world war, which became known as the “great acceleration” and was characterised by enhanced consumption and urban development.
Conversely, during times of downturn the weight of the human footprint decreases. There are key dips seen during the Great Depression and the 1979 oil crash.
“The face of Earth in the 21st century is affected in an unprecedented manner by the activities of humanity and the production and accumulation of human-made objects,” the researchers say.
Since 1900 overall biomass has decreased slightly, whereas human-made mass has increased rapidly to a production rate of more than 30 gigatonnes (30,000,000,000 tonnes) per year. If human production continues at this rate, the weight of our impact will exceed 3 teratonnes by 2040.
“This study joins recent efforts to quantify and evaluate the scale and impact of human activities on our planet,” the paper says. “The impacts of these activities have been so abrupt and considerable that it has been proposed that the current geological epoch be renamed the Anthropocene. Our study rigorously and quantitatively substantiates this proposal.”
This article was amended on 31 December 2020. An earlier version referred to the majority of global biomass being accounted for by “plants and shrubs'”; this has been amended to trees and shrubs.
All Humans do is redistribute materials from one place in earth and concentrate it to other places on Earth
The Earth has had the same amount of water for millions of years, very little gets lost and very little gets added