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A major deficiency of the growth-obsessed model driving global neoliberal economic policy is its lack of understanding on the Earth System on which it—and… ....
When not busy trying to murder humans in The Matrix, the AI program known as Agent Smith took time to pontificate on our nature as a species. You canât really consider us mammals, he reckoned, because mammals form an equilibrium with their environment. By contrast, humans move to an area and multiply âuntil every natural resource is consumed,â making us more like a kind of virus. âHuman beings are a disease,â he concluded, âa cancer of this planet. You are a plague.â I think, though, that it would be more accurate to describe humanity as a kind of biofilm, a bacterium or fungus thatâs grown as a blanket across the planet, hoovering up its resources. We plop down great cities of concrete and connect them with vast networks of highways. We level forests for timber to build homes. We turn natural materials like sand into cement and glass, and oil into asphalt, and iron into steel. In this reengineering of Earth, weâve imperiled c ....
The Download: Only 3 percent of living biomass in 1900, man-made materials such as steel, plastic, and concrete now outweigh animals, plants, and microorganisms, according to a new study by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. The total mass has grown from less than 0.1 teratonnes to 1 teratonne (1 trillion tonnes) as the scale of roads, buildings, structures, and other objects has increased beginning in the 1950s postwar construction boom, known as the “Great Acceleration,” and doubling every 20 years ever since. The amount of new stuff being produced every week is equivalent to the average body weight of all 7.7 billion people. Why It Matters: Since the first agricultural revolution, plant biomass has been halved by humans primarily due to deforestation while the amount of artificial objects has grown. It offers more evidence that we’ve entered the Anthropocene, a new geological age where humanity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Plast ....