Human activity has fundamentally changed our planet. We life on every continent and have directly effected at least 83% of the planet’s viable land surface. Our influence has impacted everything from the makeup of ecosystems to the geochemistry of Earth, from the atmosphere to the oceans. Many scientists define this time in the planet’s history by the scale of human influence, and label it as a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene.
It promises to be a fairly thin, if dramatic layer in the geological column and as time continues moving forward new deposits will bury us ever deeper.
We kids, coming of age in the '70s, we were wrong, it wasn’t the Earth that needed saving, only the biosphere and climate regime that all our human luxuries depends on. Earth’s going to do fine, might even be an exciting period, once things climb out of the pit we’re about to fall into.
Oh it’s an interesting article, not too long, but fairly broad and concise.
I love/dread reading about overconsumption as much as everyone here but come on…a graph without a labelled axis? That defeats the whole purpose of even using a graph. Are some of the lines log scale? Are they linear? What units are any of these in?
The whole point is to compare different things. So each one has a different unit. You’d have to look into the study’s methods if you want to critique it.
But the most important information contained in these graphs is the clear expression of the “exponential function”, a very misunderstood mathematical algorithm for calculating the results of steady growth over a long period of time.
