Date published: 2008/10/31
The BBC says:
The planet is headed for an ecological "credit crunch", according to a report issued by conservation groups.
The document contends that our demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third.
The Living Planet Report is the work of WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network.
It says that more than three quarters of the world's population lives in countries where consumption levels are outstripping environmental renewal.
This makes them "ecological debtors", meaning that they are drawing - and often overdrawing - on the agricultural land, forests, seas and resources of other countries to sustain them.
WWF's David Norman says the world will need two planets by 2030.
The report concludes that the reckless consumption of "natural capital" is endangering the world's future prosperity, with clear economic impacts including high costs for food, water and energy.
This kind of report is produced pretty much every year by pretty much the same (and other similarly inclined) groups. Given that we have four billion years of "natural capital" in the bank, a few decades of this allegedly negative period might not be the end of the world. But WWF and the others always believe that anything to do with humans is the end of the world.
It is amusing that every environmental report these days has to mention the current dire economic situation. Unfortunately for the authors, in spite of the implied linkage, the real credit crunch is of far more importance to the world than this report.
The people who produced this report are academic middle class and so are some of the richest people living in some of the richest countries, and so have a far, far higher "demand on natural resources" than the average citizen of the world. If they are so concerned about the situation, they should cut back on their own prodigious consumption. In particular, they should not have any children (who are the single biggest contribution to future human "demand on natural resources"). Needless to say, these academic middle class authors do not believe their own consumption is "reckless", it's just everyone else who is "reckless" (in particular, the workers of the world who dare to aspire to the same consumption levels as the academic middle class).
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