Posted May 2, 2007, 2:11 pm

Think Alike

A familiar thought experiment:

Instead of being one of six billion people on a big planet, let’s suppose you were alone on a comparable asteroid. We’ll give you your six-billionth share of the surface area, your six-billionth share of each of the major landmasses and biomes, your own six-billionth scale Africa, your own little Australia. In other words, you will have exactly the average resource ownership of everyone else on earth…

…Your little world is a model of the sustainability problem. In some ways it is a fantasy, but the scales and constraints are real, expressed not as huge global numbers but as per capita quantities…

…The fact that the planet is finite can’t be treated as a minor factohttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifr in this crucial question: how well can we sustain ourselves, meaning a modern society of six to ten billion people?

From Grist (thanks, Dad!)

Recent
Archive Info

Hosted by Strangecode.