According to the Living Planet Report (WWF Link) 2006, the Earth’s resources are now being utilized faster than they can be replaced. The report was jointly released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Global Footprint Network. (Note: the report itself is a pdf file.)
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“Living Planet Report 2006,” released today by the global conservation group WWF and the Global Footprint Network, says that by 2050 humanity will demand twice as much as the planet can supply.
The report utilizes two different indices, the Living Planet Index and the Ecological Foorprint. The first reflects the condition of ecosystems, the second indicates the human impact.
As to that footprint, there is this scary revelation:
It calculates that in 2003, humanity’s ecological footprint was 25 percent larger than the planet’s capacity to produce these resources – meaning that it took about one year and three months for the Earth to regenerate what we used in a single year. That figure is projected to rise to 30 percent this year and to 100 percent in 2050.
Without a change, precious resources will continue to dwindle. And those unable to pay the price will do without.
Despite efforts to address it, fossil fuel use still figures largely here.
The fastest growing part of that footprint is fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions, increasing more than nine fold from 1961 to 2003.
Unfortunately there has been a failure to achieve any harmony between supply and demand, what is available and what is used. It may be our undoing.
James Leape is director general of WWF International with 4,400 staff and offices in more than 100 countries.
“We have been exceeding the Earth’s ability to support our lifestyles for the past 20 years, and we need to stop,” he said. “We must balance our consumption with the natural world’s capacity to regenerate and absorb our wastes. If we do not, we risk irreversible damage.”
Balance is the key.
Thanks very much for this post, b2 — & for closing with one of my own guiding principles. The question of balance pertains to all living systems.
Frankly, at this point I’d say that ‘our undoing’ as a nation, if not as a species, seems inevitable.
Having relocated from relative wilderness to a metro area that could not exist whatsoever without outstanding reliance on fossil fuels — & realizing that this is actually the national norm (let alone a matter of national identity!), I hold very little hope that crucial change can/will be enacted in time, on the type of scale necessary.
pointed out that the major problem is our ability to believe that we can turn this thing around. As it stands now all our major brain power is used in figuring out how to use more resources. It would take a big carrot to pull those resources away from political and corporate think tanks. Maybe somebody like Warren Buffet could take charge and seed the process. It is a bigger project than any of the leading conservation groups could take on. And some of them have been co-opted by this idiotic group think we have in this country.
What could possibly be more inportant than sustainable living arrangements, jobs, factories, etc.? Of course most people are living in the immediate time frame and just look to make enough money to pay their current bills!
Your post indeed causes pause for sober reflection. Especially if you BELIEVE all that statistical stuff!
(snark ;-0) ) Seriously boran, with the current systems that are in place in the “developed” world, incentives reward using our precious resources at an ever increasing rate. Sometime in our kids, or grandkids lifetime, or even our lifetime if we live a couple of more decades, the smelly stuff is really going to hit the fan. Our climate is being drastically altered, our resources are being depleted and our population continues its uncontrolled explosion.
If we truly value a culture of life, then I would argue that one of the first steps would be worldwide population control. We should not be adding more people to this planet than it can possibly support, IMO. I know, I kind of bump in to that “right to life” thing. But those folks favor policies that will destroy the planet’s ability to support life as we know it, just as sure as I am sitting here.
Get the population under control and we might be able to curb our addiction to consumption. Let the upward spiral of population growth continue at its exponential rate, and we are headed for a catastrophic future that will be, quite literally, short lived. Personally, I’m not very optimistic.
IMHO: unfortunately, addressing the biological imperative is probably the means least feasible for affecting change, since it comes down to the most essentially natural.