Good morning,
It’s a rainy day with a high temperature of fifty-four for Whitewater today.
Whitewater’s an old Midwestern town, and her Landmarks Commission meets this afternoon at 5 PM. The Commission’s agenda for the meeting is available online.
Wired has an article about humanity’s domination of the planet. In Making Sense of 7 Billion People, Brandon Keim writes that
According to a back-of-the-envelope calculation, there are about 1.7 million other top-level, land-dwelling, mammalian predators on Earth. Put another way: For every non-human mammal sharing our niche, there are more than 4,000 of us.
In short, humans are Earth’s great omnivore, and our omnivorous nature can only be understood at global scales. Scientists estimate that 83 percent of the terrestrial biosphere is under direct human influence. Crops cover some 12 percent of Earth’s land surface, and account for more than one-third of terrestrial biomass. One-third of all available fresh water is diverted to human use.
Altogether, roughly 20 percent of Earth’s net terrestrial primary production, the sheer volume of life produced on land on this planet every year, is harvested for human purposes — and, to return to the comparative factoids, it’s all for a species that accounts for .00018 percent of Earth’s non-marine biomass.
We are the .00018 percent, and we use 20 percent.
Astounding. If we are so very influential among all of the natural order – and we are – we might expect more of ourselves for the exercise of such unrivaled power over other creatures.
We often don’t, but we should.