Consuming the Earth
Consuming the Earth
The ecological footprint of humanity, as this chapter documents, is now over 1.5 times higher than the earth’s capacity to regenerate renewable resources and assimilate waste. This crisis is worsening as the biological integrity of ecosystems continues to decline and as the global ecological footprint continues to rise (with per capita footprints rising in most countries). This chapter documents some of the accompanying ecological costs of rising rates of unsustainable consumption for forests, oceans, freshwater, soils, species, and the global climate. More than half of the world’s tropical forests have been cleared since 1950, with loggers, ranchers, and plantation owners continuing to clear millions of hectares a year. The global climate is warming, glaciers are melting, and ocean currents are shifting. And each day another 10 to 500 species (of the earth’s 8–9 million species) are going extinct.
Keywords: climate change, ecological footprint, ecosystems, oceans, renewable resources, species loss, tropical forests, unsustainable consumption
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
