Year the world changed

This is the first year that all political groups agree that climate change is happenning, and is caused by humans. Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Harper trying to be green, American President Bush calling for reductions in gas consumption, something momentous and hopeful has occurred. If we really do agree that climate change is happenning, and that it is caused by humans, then that admission is the first step towards a completely different world view.

Before, the earth was huge, we could never pollute all of it, it was capable of taking whatever we do to it in stride. We can never exhaust any resources, there will always be more... This year, for the first time, everyone recognizes that the Earth has limits. There is only a certain amount of CO2 which the atmosphere can absorb. There is only a certain number of cars we can run on our streets. There is only a certain number of people who can be supported by this big blue marble. We cannot pollute one area and then just move on. Wherever we go, someone else has either already been, or is living there now. The skies are no longer open, we now will have to divide a pie that is a fixed size. In a fundamental way, our world view has changed.

We will define the carrying capacity of the Earth and have to figure it out how to portion it out to the people of the world. Something will have to happen when groups overuse their resources. The alternative is to turn the planet into a giant version of Easter Island... we can exhaust the entire planet, and the carrying capacity will drop drastically, in the worst case, to zero.
That people now realise that this is possible, and given our past, even close to certain, is the most important development in humans' appreciation of our place in the world in many centuries.

In Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee" he very convincingly makes the case that there is a mass extinction going on. It started nearly a hundred thousand years ago, and has been picking up steam. 13,000 years ago, there were megafauna all across the americas: giant sloths, horses, Mammoths. 12,000 years ago, humans arrived on the continents. by 11,000 years ago almost all large land mammals were extinct. Things have not improved since then, the rate at which we are eliminating species keeps accellerating. Our arrival, in terms of species diversity, is more traumatic to the worlds' fauna than the extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. We are an extinction event. Our biggest challenge is to keep ourselves from going the same way.

references:

• Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (the first book sketching out his approach to history, it presents themes which are more thoroughly exposed in later works...)
  
• Jared Diamond, Collapse! (have not read this yet... it is clearly a series of case studies of societies which exceeded the carrying capacity of their environment and the bad things that resulted.)