How Long Have Humans Dominated the Planet? How Much Nature Do We Have to Use? | Guest Blog. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Notnarayan It’s so easy to slip into debt, but so hard to dig oneself out. Just ask the typical wage earner—even business and national leaders. People who know better still wait for that next paycheck, assumed pay raise or small miracle to help them catch up. As any accountant will tell you, accumulating debt is not a sound financial management policy. If you want to grow your savings and avoid going into financial debt, you need to spend your money no faster than you earn it.
To do this, you need to know exactly how much money you make and spend over a given period, and compare the two. You can then create a budget for continuing to live within your means by predicting how your future earning and spending may change. Biocapacity can be compared with the rate at which you are using these ecological services—your “Ecological Footprint.” It is also sometimes claimed that the Footprint accounts lead to perverse conclusions, a consequence of methodological flaws. How Fisheries Affect Evolution. L’homme au même niveau que l’anchois dans la chaîne alimentaire. Dans la chaîne alimentaire, l'homme ne se situe pas au sommet, comme il pourrait le penser, mais au même niveau que... les anchois et les cochons.
Bien loin, donc, d'un super prédateur. C'est la conclusion d'une étude originale, visant à mesurer l'impact de la consommation humaine sur les écosystèmes, publiée dans les Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lundi 2 décembre. Pour arriver à ce résultat déroutant, l'équipe conjointe de l'Institut français de recherche pour l'exploitation de la mer (Ifremer), de l'Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) et d'Agrocampus-Ouest a utilisé un outil classique en écologie, mais qui n'avait jamais été appliqué à l'homme auparavant : le niveau trophique, qui permet de positionner les différentes espèces dans la chaîne alimentaire. A la base de cette échelle, et donc tout en bas de la chaîne alimentaire, la valeur 1 correspond aux plantes et au plancton. Car manger un carnivore n'a pas le même impact que manger un végétal. The Balance of Nature and Human Impact.Klaus Rohde, editor.
The Balance of Nature and Human Impact. Klaus Rohde, editor.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.426 pp. ISBN 97811070109614 (hardcover), $99 Aldina M. A. . + Author Affiliations Human impact on the natural environment has reached unprecedented levels. This book summarizes ecological responses to global environmental change; it is relevant to interested readers of different backgrounds trying to understand why scientists are worried about current environmental change. The book starts with Kevin Gaston’s foreword and an analogy between stability concepts needed for sea kayaking and instability … You haven’t so much lost a planet, as gained five dwarves… | Guest Blog.
…or maybe a few hundred. Photo: A. V. Flox One of my favorite shirts honors the brave souls of the former planet Pluto, those billion voices which shouted out in agony and were suddenly silent as the International Astronomical Union’s space station destroyed– wait, no. That’s not what happened to Pluto. Pluto got demoted from the ranks of “planet” to “dwarf planet” a few years ago, much to the dismay of students around the country. What dwarf planets are Let’s start with the reason Pluto got demoted in the first place. So let’s take a look at what they are, where they are, and what’s going on with them. Eight of our nine dwarf planets and candidates, to scale, with their moons and our best guess of their colors.
First of all, there’s an official definition of a dwarf planet that makes it possible to actually argue about which is which. More generally, planets can clear debris out of their path in several ways. A Grand Tour of the Dwarves So where do these dwarf planets live? Plastisphere microbes go to sea on flotsam fragments - environment - 02 July 2013. (Image: Erik Zettler/Sea Education Association) We dump huge amounts of plastic waste into the ocean every year, much of it ending up as microplastic – fragments less than 5 millimetres across. Famously, much of it has gathered in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it may harm animals that inadvertently swallow it. Now, it appears that microplastic is hosting life as well as hurting it, creating a new niche in the vast oceans. The tiny fragments in the Atlantic Ocean have been colonised by microbes not found in open water, a community dubbed the "plastisphere".
Linda Amaral-Zettler of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and colleagues collected microplastic from the north Atlantic and examined it with scanning electron microscopy and gene-sequencing techniques. Some of the bacteria could break down hydrocarbons (the building blocks of plastics), and the plastic fragments were often pitted. Microbes are not the only organisms to adopt the plastic lifestyle. The Anthropocene - Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 41(1):45.
The Historical Nature of Cities. A Study of Urbanization and Hazardous Waste Accumulation Abstract Endemic uncertainties surrounding urban industrial waste raise important theoretical and methodological challenges for understanding the historical nature of cities. Our study advances a synthetic framework for engaging these challenges by extending theories of modern risk society and classic urban ecology to investigate the accumulation of industrial hazards over time and space. Data for our study come from a unique longitudinal dataset containing geospatial and organizational information on more than 2,800 hazardous manufacturing sites operating between 1956 and 2006 in Portland, Oregon.
We pair these site data with historical data from the U.S. population census and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to examine the historical accumulation of hazardous parcels in relation to changing patterns of industrial land use, neighborhood composition, new residential development, and environmental regulation. Moralizing biology: The appeal and limits of the new compassionate view of nature. In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the life-sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression.
In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality – to the present transformation of biology and evolution into direct sources of moral phenomena, a process here named the ‘moralization of biology’. I conclude by addressing the ambivalent status of this constellation of authors, for whom today ‘morality comes naturally’: I explore both the attractiveness of their message, and the problematic epistemological assumptions of their research programmes in the light of new discoveries in developmental and molecular biology. © 2013 SAGE Publications.
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. Trends in Ecology and Evolution - Niche syndromes, species extinction risks, and management under climate change. To view the full text, please login as a subscribed user or purchase a subscription. Click here to view the full text on ScienceDirect. Highlights •Species can survive beyond the bounds of the fundamental niche. •The ‘tolerance niche’ informs extinction risk and management options.
•Relations among the realized, fundamental, and tolerance niche can be examined. •These ‘niche syndromes’ have not previously been characterized. •Characterizing niche syndromes can advance basic and applied research goals. The current distributions of species are often assumed to correspond with the total set of environmental conditions under which species can persist. To access this article, please choose from the options below Register an Account If you do not have an account, create one by clicking the button below, and take full advantage of this site's features. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature - Vaclav Smil. Trends in Ecology & Evolution - Multiscale regime shifts and planetary boundaries. Highlights The history of life reveals repeated planetary-scale tipping points. The pace of global changes is often slow even after a tipping point is exceeded.
The risk of long-term damage to Earth systems that support humanity is increasing. Planetary-scale governance is needed to safeguard humans and ecosystems. Life on Earth has repeatedly displayed abrupt and massive changes in the past, and there is no reason to expect that comparable planetary-scale regime shifts will not continue in the future. Different lines of evidence indicate that regime shifts occur when the climate or biosphere transgresses a tipping point. Keywords tipping points; alternate stable states; regime shift; transient dynamics; climate change; paleoecology; resilience; planetary boundaries Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. Trends in Ecology and Evolution - Are we willing to build a better future? In their recent article in TREE , Nekola et al. [ 1 ] contend that Malthusian limits and Darwinian innovation are two major forces in population dynamics, and that their interplay is central to determining whether humans will be able to establish sustainable relations with the finite Earth.
According to these authors, two crucial questions are: what are the growth limits? And, what if they are met? Nekola et al. also propose three strategies for a sustainable future: ‘(i) negative population growth for a number of generations, followed by zero growth; (ii) a steady-state economy based on sustainable use of renewable energy and material resources; and (iii) new social norms that favour the welfare of the entire global population over that of specific individuals and groups’.
The authors largely rely on biological and/or cultural evolution to attain such goals. Population control has also been widely treated. References 1 Nekola, J.C., et al. (2013). 2 Rockström, J., et al. (2009). What If We Never Run Out of Oil? - Charles C. Mann. New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare. Ralph Wilson/AP As the great research ship Chikyu left Shimizu in January to mine the explosive ice beneath the Philippine Sea, chances are good that not one of the scientists aboard realized they might be closing the door on Winston Churchill’s world.
Their lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill’s outsize role in the history of energy is insufficiently appreciated. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. Churchill’s proposal led to emphatic dispute. Churchill fired the starting gun, but all of the Western powers joined the race to control Middle Eastern oil. The Chikyu, which first set out in 2005, was initially intended to probe earthquake-generating zones in the planet’s mantle, a subject of obvious interest to seismically unstable Japan. What unconventional fuels tell us about the global energy system | Plugged In. The Japanese vessel Chikyu is part of research efforts to extract methane hydrates from the sea floor. Credit: IODP/JAMSTEC Several days ago I finished reading Charles C.
Mann’s article in The Atlantic titled “What If We Never Run Out Of Oil?” , a long-form discussion of the history and technology of established sources of energy like oil and natural gas, as well as relative newcomers from hydraulic fracturing or methane hydrates. If you haven’t read it yet, please do so . Fossil fuels will continue to be an important and dominant fuel source for the foreseeable future. The third point above deserves more attention. In reading the criticism of Mann’s post, I get the sense of well-intentioned folks confronting an inconvenient truth: we are an energy-hungry society and there will be demand for more and more energy and we’ll find new ways of meeting that demand, likely with unconventional hydrocarbon resources.
This is apparent in Mann’s discussion of coal in light of cheap natural gas: