Humans Use 83 Percent of Earth's Surface 719
belloc writes "CNN is reporting on a Wildlife Conservation Society report that states that humans take up 83 percent of the Earth's land surface to live on, farm, mine or fish. The article rerers to a WCS human footprint map, but the WCS site seems to have been CNN'd. Funny: I just got back from a little road trip across the southwest, and from all the nothing you see out there, you would think that 83% is a bit high. I guess Arizona farmlands must look a lot like wild, untouched desert."
The article (sans pictures) (Score:5, Informative)
The Human Footprint
Human influence is driving conservation crises on a global scale. There is little debate in scientific circles about the importance of human influence on ecosystems. Scientists have shown that we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green stuff) produced on Earth each year either taking it directly or keeping other organisms from using it through our agriculture and land use practices (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001). We consume 35% of the productivity of the oceanic shelf, are fishing down food webs, and taking 60% of the available freshwater run-off. Although just estimates, these few statistics are testament to the unprecedented escalations in both human population and consumption during the twentieth century, resulting in entirely new environmental crises in the history of humankind and the world. E.O Wilson, the famous naturalist, claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if all humans consumed at the rate of the average North American. The influence of human beings on the planet has become so pervasive that it is hard to find an adult person in any country who has not seen the environment around her reduced in natural values during her life time - woodlots converted to agriculture, agricultural lands converted to suburban development, suburban development converted to urban areas. Think of your life, of your neighborhood, of the neighborhood you grew up in -- what it was and what it is now.
The cumulative effect of these many local changes is the global phenomenon of human influence on nature, poorly understood and needlessly destructive. Human influence is arguably the most important factor affecting life of all kinds in today's world. Yet despite the broad consensus among biologists about the importance of human influence on nature, this phenomenon and its implications are less appreciated by the broader human community, which does not recognize them in its economic systems or most of its political decisions.
Formerly it was difficult to visualize this influence across the entire planet, but recent advances in the quality of geographic data now allow us to systematically measure human influence on the land's surface. We used a series of map overlays representing human land uses, power infrastructure (based on lights visible at night to a satellite), settlements, roads and other access points, and human population density to map the "human footprint" on the land's surface.
Click here for a larger version in PDF format
The Last of the Wild
Analysis of the Human Footprint indicates that 83% of the land's surface is directly influenced by human agency. 98% of the areas where it's possible to grow rice or wheat or corn (maize) are similarly influenced. It is within the remaining 17% of the land's surface that some of the best remaining opportunities for conservation lie. We located 568 "last of the wild" places as targets for conservation action. Although these wild places vary enormously in their biological productivity and diversity, they represent the least influenced or "wildest" areas in each of their respective biomes on each continent. As such they provide a promising opportunity to conserve wildlife and wild places while minimizing conflicts with existing human structures and demands.
Meanwhile individuals, institutions and governments must find solutions across the gradient of human influence in order for conservation to succeed. Human influence presents a problem to the co-existence of people and wildlife, and human ingenuity is the key to transform the human footprint and save the last of the wild.
References:
Rojstaczer S, Sterling SM, Moore, NJ. 2001. Human appropriation of photosynthesis products.
Vitousek PM, Ehrlich PR, Ehrlich AH, Matson PA. 1986. Human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis. BioScience 36: 368-373.
Wilson EO. 2002. The Future of Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Re:Hmmm -- READ THE ARTICLE (Score:5, Informative)
I appreciate that this is slashdot and the idea of a moment's thought before a smartass comment is utterly alien.
Re:What does it all mean? (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, welcome to fractal geometry. What is the actual surface area covered by a pattern of dots? It's somewhere between 1 and 2 dimensions (fractional dimension [everything2.com]). This isn't so much measured as it is calculated, and of course the result would be far less than 83%. Clearly the CNN analysis wasn't this rigorous.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
Second, people do fish on land. Fish farms come to my mind...
But none of this has anything to do with developing nations meeting in New Delhi about the Kyoto protocol http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2349289.stm
The Club of Rome (Score:5, Informative)
Using similar methods, the Club of Rome predicted in the early 1970s that the world would run out of oil by 1992. They and others also predicted that the West would be hopelessly overpopulated by... right around now. Both predictions have proven to be wildly inaccurate, but they got a lot of press at the time, and they were taken seriously by what passes for "intellectuals" (whose only measure of "truth" is how well a given story dovetails with their ideology).
In other words, this kind of nonsense is a great method for people like the WWF to solicit donations and get their names in the paper, but you shouldn't mistake it for meaningful information.
This was covered in The Economist already, by the way. Old news. They've got some amusing observations about how slipshod the "study"'s methods are, and how many hidden assumptions it relies on.
256287 Square Feet per person. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Statistics (Score:3, Informative)
The statistics regarding the World Wildlife Fund's footprint are accurate for TODAY the 'ecological footprint' is defined as the 'area of productive land and water that people need to support their consumption and to dispose of waste'. London's footprint is 120 times as big as the land it covers, and as extrapolated by the WWF, Earth's ecological footprint is in danger of growing larger than the entire planet.
The problem is, this 'footprint' statistic, while accurate, is only accurate for today (ok, tomorrow as well). But people (eg the WWF) are using it to extrapolate 50 years in the future. The WWF say we will need between 1.8 and 2.2 Earth-sized planets to meet our needs by 2050 - this is using an ecological snapshot of the footprint today. The prediction holds true if we continue our current trend of fossil-fuel consumption, but statistics have shown that we are beginning the hard process of moving over to renewable or alternative energy sources - hybrid cars as a good example.
Thus, if we continue to invest in alternative energy sources, the ecological footprint will decrease, something the WWF didn't even consider in their statement
Also, there are a lot of factors to consider when drawing up the size of a footprint, especially a global one. Every time you collapse lots of diverse information you lose something, and that loss will increase the bigger your evaluation. Still, as a yardstick for measuring human consumption per capita, it's not bad (so long as you don't use it to predict!)
Re:While flying it seems this is pretty true.. (Score:4, Informative)
I can say there are millions of hectares of untouched forest, rivers, lakes and mountains. No cutlines, no surveying lines, no power lines, *nothing*. Every time I fly over the southern Yukon, I think "I wonder what the fishing is like in that lake. It must be completely untouched." But the pilot never is willing to land for me to check it out. Stupid plane needs a stupid runway bla bla bla. :)
exaggerating numbers to make a point- awful! (Score:3, Informative)
Even if the underlying claim is sound, when it is presented in a way that is obviously desgined to exagerrate the effect (hasn't everyone read How to Lie with Statistics [amazon.com] and How to Lie with Charts [amazon.com] by now?) it ruins the credibility and undermines whatever (possibly valid) point they were trying to make.
For example:
True honest analyses are unbelievable rare, but there have been some uplifting ones memorable to me:
I remember in the late 80s when David Gaines was forming the Mono Lake committee [monolake.org] to fight the drop in water levels at Mono Lake in California. The members were primarily biologists, and after some study, the decision was that the lake level should not be below x feet (I don't remember the exact value.) So the lawsuits were filed to prevent the lake from dropping below x. Some of the more political-type folks around were saying- "we should ask for x+50- that way, there is some room for comprimise when they don't give us what we want." All the biologists and science-types said "No, there is no compromise- our science shows the lake needs to be at level x, end of story. No inflated demands expecting comprimise- this is what needs to happen." That was a refreshing instance of increasingly-rare honest quantitative analyses of public policy decisions, and unfortunately such examples are few and far between in the public debate.
Do the math on population vs land use. (Score:1, Informative)
This is using Texas, while a largish American state is not all that big on the planetary scale. Sorry Texas. I wish I weren't too lazy to look up and convert the total land mass of the earth, but I can't see where this can expand to anything like 85% without giving everyone thousands of acres each to cover that number. Looks like more FUD from the Greenies to me.
Re:More Skewed numbers... (Score:3, Informative)
Point taken. However this methodology is too inaccurate to be used as the basis for a purportedly mathematical and scientific analysis.
Their assumptions mean that many pristine national parks will show up as "influenced" merely because there is a human settlement of any kind (even if it's just lights from a park ranger's base camp!) within 15 km.
Another example: they have the entire Rub al Khali (The Empty Quarter) of the Arabian desert, where Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman meet, as being moderately influence. Presumably they feel that workers in the scattered oil wells trek 15 km everyday in order to hunt for food or otherwise influence their environment. Now I know from personal experience that this is not the case, and that the Rub al Khalia is as close to "pre-human wilderness" as it gets. (I lived in the UAE for 2 years.)
I absolutely agree that human influence is pervasive, and I even allowed in my original post that their numbers (83% etc.) might be correct. However my point is that the methods they used are too inaccurate to justify their conclusions.
Re:Crap (Score:3, Informative)
Also, surface vegetation tends to hold any nighttime condensation, which in turn waters the plants. That's why the desert where I live is in bloom right now, and why every weed seed around has suddenly erupted from the dirt -- fall nighttime temps have dropped below the dew point. (We haven't had any RAIN to speak of in almost FIVE YEARS.)
Anyway, point is that if you increase surface vegetation, particularly with self-shading plants (ie. that keep their own roots cool, like palms and pines do), and add some tough ground cover like drought-tolerant grasses, over the long haul it actually conserves soil moisture.
BTW, some pines, and even some deciduous trees, tend to do quite well in the desert. California digger pines, osage oranges, and cottonwoods (of all things) are surviving our drought just fine.
Re:The Club of Rome (Score:2, Informative)
The relationship between greenhouse gases and global temperature is only well "known" among the environmentalist extreemists and the uninformed. Nobody is claiming that CO2 levels are decreasing in the atmosphere, but there is no evidence scientific or otherwise that can conclusively link a rise in C02 to a rise in global temperature.
Yes, global surface temperatures rose an average of 0.053 degrees C per decade in the 20th century, but at the same time atmospheric temperatures decreased , particularly in the latter half of the century.
It is a historical fact that global temperatures have fluctuated as much as 10 degrees C. The Ice Ages alone prove that global temperatures vary regardless of human involvement. Why is this any different?
Because CFC's were cut out (think back to the Montreal Protocol)
Again, if you check the facts you can see that this is easily disputed. Here [nasa.gov] is a graph showing the size of the ozone layer since 1980. The 2002 datapoint of about 15 million km^2 isn't even on there (a little more than 1/2 of the 2000 size). CFC aerosol cans were banned in 1976 and the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1989. Can you see any kind of link in the ozone size to this reduction on "greenhouse" gases? Are you honestly trying to convince me that these two are somehow related? Why would the hole in the ozone reach its peak a full 11 years after the Montreal Protocol was signed?
can you name a single peer reviewed scientific publication from that time period which is about this global freezing
I'm sorry, I let my subscriptions to all the 1970's scientific publications run out. I guess that means this is propoganda. Actually, Peter Singer (one of the more lefty whacko's out there) has written several books on a variety of subjects, including the "global freezing" scare of the 1970's.
the simple fact is that the vast majority of the worlds climatical scientists support this theory
Give me a list of scientists that support this theory, and I'll show you a list that don't. Its just plain bad science, and the only reason people think it is supported by a majority of scientists is because it isn't politically correct to argue it. For example, here [cnn.com] is the CNN writeup of the shrinking ozone hole this month. The size of the hole reaches a 12 year low, and the only scientific opinion expressed is: "Scientists caution that the data are insufficient to conclude that the fragile ozone layer is on the mend. "