[aldente]

50000 years ago supposedly early humans influenced and destroyed an existing equilibrium already with the use of fire. There seem to be a pattern going on here with us humans and our relationship to this element. After all, how do we use oil primarily?

This particular article refers to Australia and the destructive ability of the early humans to use fire: Quote: "Climate change is too slow to have killed off most of the grasses, argues Miller. The best explanation is that people began burning the landscape". Read the rest of the article:
Newscientist

[I_Like_Plants]

There's a bird in India called the fire hawk that's been observed using smoldering sticks from fires to drop onto grassy brushy etc fields and then it eats the charred mice, bugs, etc left by the fire, but we humans are truly the fire-using animal. There's evidence we were cooking our food 2 million years ago, at least in our hunter-gatherer stage of existance using fire we're still in balance with Mother Earth.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Impressive costume. Is it kitsch or is it Art?

[pea-jay]

If you are looking for a culprit that marked the start of our route down our unsustainable existance, look no further than agriculture. This harnessing of biomass to provide abundant energy (food) allowed humans to grow beyond a subsistence level existence, in the process upsetting the equilibrium.

[Raxozanne]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pea-jay', 'I')f you are looking for a culprit that marked the start of our route down our unsustainable existance, look no further than agriculture. This harnessing of biomass to provide abundant energy (food) allowed humans to grow beyond a subsistence level existence, in the process upsetting the equilibrium.

[BiGG]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pea-jay', 'I')f you are looking for a culprit that marked the start of our route down our unsustainable existance, look no further than agriculture. This harnessing of biomass to provide abundant energy (food) allowed humans to grow beyond a subsistence level existence, in the process upsetting the equilibrium.

[killJOY]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Nobel Prize winner Dr. Steven Chu, director of the University of California managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says less than 1/3 of the world’s cultivable land is needed for feeding 9 billion people and we currently have a little over 6 billion.

[Ludi]

There's evidence the North American prairies were created (or probably more accurately, encouraged) by fires started by humans. Fire suppresses trees though, not grass. Once grass is established, trees have trouble growing back. If fires are too frequent, the soil is damaged and even the grass has trouble growing back, but this usually requires frequent burning, such as the annual burning of crop residues in some places. Very bad for the soil. Trees are critical for the creation of precipitation. If too many trees are cleared in sensitive areas, especially near coasts, or on mountainsides, clouds can fail to form, and there is little rain.

[BiGG]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('killJOY', '
')1. None of the links provided is about this agriculture/population claim.

[Raxozanne]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BiGG', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pea-jay', 'I')f you are looking for a culprit that marked the start of our route down our unsustainable existance, look no further than agriculture. This harnessing of biomass to provide abundant energy (food) allowed humans to grow beyond a subsistence level existence, in the process upsetting the equilibrium.

[aldente]

Pre-Jay you have a very good blog going on there I just noticed. For instance on transportation I found this, quote:

Transportation is often viewed as a matter of convenience or necessity but in reality its role in civilized existence is far more basic (and vital). According to William Catton, transportation is a social leveraging strategy called Scope Enlargement. What the movement of goods allows us to do is balance the surpluses and shortages of a number of areas, so that all can progress to a higher level of development than would have been possible without it. This has reached a culmination of sorts, with today’s transportation now extending worldwide. With it comes a worldwide dependence on the continued free flow of resources, goods and wastes. At this point many places on the planet are dependent on something from somewhere else.

UnPlanning the Future

[BiGG]

Raxozanne,

The key words here are “sustainable agriculture” and typing them into any search engine will bring up a wealth of hits regarding this subject.

A common misconception is holding practices of the past & present as the only option and that’s just not the case.

A typical farm can produce ethanol/biodiesel from corn/grain/beans before feeding it to cows/pigs/poultry for instance while using the manure for electricity (methane gas production generating electricity) before returning the now stink-free manure to the field for fertilizer. Past & present common practices simply fed the corn/grain/beans directly to the animals and disposed of their waste while using artificial fertilizer and not getting the benefit of useable fuel from the process.

Crop rotation and secondary annual cover crops plowed under and also used for fertilizer add to the mix. Engineered seed is reducing the need for water & pesticides. Agriculture is moving forward as fast as other technologies and viable alternatives to today’s common practices already exist. They will be implemented more & more now but again, macroeconomics dictate the need for a slow & orderly change for nearly everything, especially large scale items like food production as millions of jobs and trillions of dollars are based on the current system which cannot be changed overnight.

[Raxozanne]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BiGG', 'R')axozanne,

The key words here are “sustainable agriculture” and typing them into any search engine will bring up a wealth of hits regarding this subject.

A common misconception is holding practices of the past & present as the only option and that’s just not the case.

A typical farm can produce ethanol/biodiesel from corn/grain/beans before feeding it to cows/pigs/poultry for instance while using the manure for electricity (methane gas production generating electricity) before returning the now stink-free manure to the field for fertilizer. Past & present common practices simply fed the corn/grain/beans directly to the animals and disposed of their waste while using artificial fertilizer and not getting the benefit of useable fuel from the process.

Crop rotation and secondary annual cover crops plowed under and also used for fertilizer add to the mix. Engineered seed is reducing the need for water & pesticides. Agriculture is moving forward as fast as other technologies and viable alternatives to today’s common practices already exist. They will be implemented more & more now but again, macroeconomics dictate the need for a slow & orderly change for nearly everything, especially large scale items like food production as millions of jobs and trillions of dollars are based on the current system which cannot be changed overnight.

[Antimatter]

I like agriculture. It allowed me to stuff my face with a pizza delivered to my door tonight without even lifting a finger. *buurp* Yeah baby.

[/spam thread]

[Ludi]

The main limit to agriculture is water. Some kinds of sustainable agriculture use less water than conventional agriculture, but most kinds of agriculture require irrigation. So this is a challenge that will need to be faced soon as some of the fossil aquifers are being depleted.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Antimatter', 'I') like agriculture. It allowed me to stuff my face with a pizza delivered to my door tonight without even lifting a finger. *buurp* Yeah baby.

[/spam thread]

[Grimnir]

It's really not fair to blame humans for doing what Earth-organisms have always done from day one. If you look at the history of life on Earth, it's one big story of exponential growth from the Precambrian right up to the modern era. Sure, there were some major setbacks along the way (the biggest took place at the end of the Permian and the most famous after the Cretaceous), but life always recovered and kept right on growing and adapting. The history of humankind has simply mirrored the history of life, but on a much shorter timescale. For much of life's history, there was nothing but a bunch of solitary cells floating around in the ocean, and for much of humanity's history, there was nothing but a bunch of tribes hunting in the jungle. Both life on Earth and humanity have experienced rapid growth in complexity during the most recent 1% or so of their histories. We may well be in for another major setback, but I think it's good to keep our behavior in perspective.

[PenultimateManStanding]

I don't think the notion of exponential growth is properly applied to ecosystems. There are muture and immature systems, but life as a whole does not grow exponentially for billions of years, its impossible.

[Grimnir]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'I') don't think the notion of exponential growth is properly applied to ecosystems. There are muture and immature systems, but life as a whole does not grow exponentially for billions of years, its impossible.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Grimnir', '
')-December 31st, just before midnight: The fist humans.

And all the human-induced growth has occurred in the last seconds before midnight. Sounds like a story of exponential growth to me.