Sustainability-by-Design ~ NYT OpEd on Overpop

Read today's bold OpEd in NYTimes by Professor Erle Ellis asserting that Overpopulation Is Not the Problem...

"The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered “natural” ecosystems. [...] Our predecessors in the genus Homo used social hunting strategies and tools of stone and fire to extract more sustenance from landscapes than would otherwise be possible. And, of course, Homo sapiens went much further [...] Who knows what will be possible with the technologies of the future? The important message from these rough numbers should be clear. There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity. We are nothing at all like bacteria in a petri dish. Why is it that highly trained natural scientists don’t understand this? [...] The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. [...] The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it."

FYI, DeLong shares Human Population estimates...

Welcome to the Anthropocene ~ Human Planet...

Thanks to Dot Earthling Andrew Revkin for his piece in NYTimes on The ‘Anthropocene’ as Environmental Meme and/or Geological Epoch spotlighting this Planet Under Pressure environmental meme promo...

Anthropocene ~ Economist on Man-Made World

The latest Economist gives a geological timeline of the earth as part of their story on The Anthropocene...

"In 2000 Paul Crutzen, an eminent atmospheric chemist, realised he no longer believed he was living in the 10,000-year-old Holocene epoch, a peculiarly stable and clement part of the Quaternary period, a time distinguished by regular shifts into and out of ice ages. Mr Crutzen decided he was living in some other age, one shaped primarily by people. From their trawlers scraping the floors of the seas to their dams impounding sediment by the gigatonne, from their stripping of forests to their irrigation of farms, from their mile-deep mines to their melting of glaciers, humans were bringing about an age of planetary change. With a colleague, Eugene Stoermer, Dr Crutzen suggested this age be called the Anthropocene -- “the recent age of man”