The Human Footprint and the Last of the Wild (original) (raw)
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The presence and action of humans on Earth has exerted a strong influence on the evolution of the planet over the past ≈ 10,000 years, the consequences of which are now becoming broadly evident. Despite a deluge of tightly-focused and necessarily technical studies exploring each facet of “human impacts” on the planet, their integration into a complete picture of the human-Earth system lags far behind. Here, we quantify twelve dimensionless ratios which put the magnitude of human impacts in context, comparing the magnitude of anthropogenic processes to their natural analogues. These ratios capture the extent to which humans alter the terrestrial surface, hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and biogeochemistry of Earth. In almost all twelve cases, the impact of human processes rivals or exceeds their natural counterparts. The values and corresponding uncertainties for these impacts at global and regional resolution are drawn from the primary scientific literature, governmental and int...
Human domination of Earth's ecosystems
Science, 1997
Human alteration of Earth is substantial and growing. Between one-third and one-half of the land surface has been transformed by human action; the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined; more than half of all accessible surface fresh water is put to use by humanity; and about one-quarter of the bird species on Earth have been driven to extinction. By these and other standards, it is clear that we live on a humandominated planet.
'Anthropocene' a new Tool for Understanding of human generate backlash of Nature.
The most recent epoch, the Holocene, has been a period of relative environmental stability, allowing humans to develop agriculture and establish settlements, culminating in modern civilization. Human activities have now reached such a scale that we are having significant impacts on planetary systems, and these effects are of sufficient magnitude to Within a human lifetime, the face of Earth has been transformed. Cities now dominate the landscape, and even if people disappeared tomorrow, cities would remain one of the Anthropocene’s most visible and enduring legacies.In 1950, only 29% of people lived in cities. Today more than half do, and that proportion is expected to reach 70% by 2050. Recently, urban growth has shifted from Europe and South America to Asia and Africa. Asia’s urban population is growing faster than that anywhere else. It passed the billion mark in 1990, and is expected to reach 3.4 billion by 2025. In the next couple of decades, more than 275 million people are projected to move into India’s enormous city centres. In Africa, meanwhile, only 40% live in cities, but this is changing fast.This frenetic urban growth is a big cause of environmental change. It drives loss of agricultural land, changes in temperature and the loss of biodiversity. Cities consume two-thirds of the world’s total energy and account for more than 70% of all energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. But people living in cities often have low carbon emissions because of efficient public transport systems and the fact that people often live closer to their work. Neither climatic nor biogeochemical stability is likely to continue in the Anthropocene, and the Earth systems we rely on to provide a liveable environment for human society are likely to become much less predictable. The stability of our infrastructure, the reliability of our production systems and the liveability of our cities will all be much less certain in the future. More research on the diverse aspects of global change will certainly help to improve predictions on the timing and extent of changes, but will not alter the basic conclusion that global change is upon us.
The Anthropocene Review, 2014
We search for a valid and quantifiable description of how and when humans acquired the ability to dominate major features of the Earth System. While common approaches seek to quantify the human impact upon the carbon cycle by identifying the area of land cleared by humans, our point of departure is different human modes of subsistence, and we base our analysis on their social metabolism, in particular their energy metabolism. As a starting point, we use Ehrlich's classical IPAT formula, and give it a specific interpretation: human impact on Earth = population size × affluence (interpreted as energy available per person) × technology -for each mode of subsistence. The overall impact (or rather human pressure) then equals the composite sum of these. We qualitatively describe the functional characteristics of hunter gatherers, agrarian and industrial modes of subsistence such as population dynamics, energy regime and the technologies by which they interact with their environment. In a 'toy' model, we translate these considerations into global numbers for the past millennia: we estimate the respective population sizes and affluence (energy), and finally also technology concerning its impact on the carbon cycle. We see a major historical dividing line around ad 1500: until then, human population growth and metabolic rates carry about equal weight in increasing human pressure on the environment approximately fivefold from the year ad 1 onwards. From then on, the overall pressure of humanity upon the Earth increases by one order of magnitude; energy intensity contributes to this rise by roughly tripling the impact of population growth. Technology, because it is based upon a shift from biomass to fossil fuels (and other 'modern' energy carriers), does not moderate this impact, but enhances it by a factor of 1.5.