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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: The Face of Seven Billion People The face of seven billion over-populating, over-consuming people 09/03/2011 8:00:00 AM by Greg Bolton The human population will hit a whopping 7 billion in 2011 - assuming we don't blow up the planet first. A recent, exceptional National Geographic feature gets us thinking. Venerable National Geographic Magazine, generally known for its rock-solid but not exactly controversial reportage, is currently tearing up the Internet with a new article and associated imagery about the ever-swelling human population, and the effect it's having on the planet. First, there's the image, based on a man's face, comprised of 7,000 human figures, each representing a million people, and all adding up to the earth's expected population by the end of 2011: more than 7 billion. Interactive overlays on the image give us broad breakdowns by categories like languages spoken (13% Mandarin, 5% Spanish, 5% English); livelihood (40% services; 38% agriculture; 22% industry); and so on. Some overlays offer a single, striking statistic, like the one telling us that a whopping 81% of the world is now literate. But then there's the main event, a short article by Elizabeth Kolbert called "Enter the Anthropocene - Age of Man", which may be even more striking than the imagery surrounding it. So what's this anthropocene, you ask? The article explains that it's "a new name for a new geologic epoch - one defined by our own massive impact on the planet." In fact, the term was coined over a decade ago by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, so most people wouldn't consider it "new." But geologists work with a slightly more protracted time-frame than most of us punters. (And for the record, the term has yet to be formally accepted into the Geologic Time Scale. Stay tuned on that one.) Crutzen's word was born from the idea that, since the end of the 19th Century or so, we have been living in a geological era largely defined not by centuries-long, gradual developments but by the fast-paced activities of its most influential residents: humans. Geology has typically been measured, in other words, in millennia or multiple millennia. It's possible, say Crutzen and many others, that in a couple hundred years, we've changed all that. In 1800, the human population was pegged at about a billion people. The mass movement of formerly rural populations into urban centres, along with numerous other factors like advances in medicine, contributed to incredible population growth. It's a monumental understatement to mention that along the way, humans were also doing more to the planet - and faster, and with far greater long-term environmental results - than ever before. So much so, in fact, that we may be breaking down the distinction between human and geological history. To future geologists, according to one scientist, "our impact may look as sudden and profound as that of an asteroid." And not just any asteroid. A really, really big asteroid. The kind of asteroid that hit earth 65 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs, and changed the very composition of the oceans. The kind of asteroid you might see in a disaster movie featuring Will Smith and a power ballad by Aerosmith. So that's what the anthroposcene is. It's us. Or more precisely, it's the era in which we humans possess, and are exercising, such power over the natural environment that the destructive effects of our efforts will be not just culturally significant, not even simply environmentally significant, but geologically significant. In some ways, this is just another way of pointing out that we are over-populating our planet and over-consuming its resources, and that we're headed for a fall. The vast majority of us already accept that fact, even if we don't do much about it. But it's a little more striking to me than previous formulations to say that the last couple of centuries of human activity may one day be deemed to have had the catastrophic power of a giant space rock slamming into the planet and instantaneously changing the composition of the oceans, the atmosphere, and so forth. Here's hoping that, a few millennia from now, we're remembered for other stuff, too. Or, for that matter, that there's someone around to remember us for it. Kolbert, in an interview with Anthropology Magazine, put it most succinctly, if also most depressingly: "(We) are now in the driver's seat. Unfortunately, we don't really know how to operate the vehicle.
Poster Comment: Well, excuuuse me, for breathing! The eugenics crowd will have a field day with this article.
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