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open up google maps and search for Philadelphia. Click satellite at the bottom left. pan to the left. you should see ~40% of the area is green. you are stil

open up google maps and search for Philadelphia. Click satellite at the bottom left. pan to the left. you should see ~40% of the area is green. you are still mostly within the city. pan left again. your in the suburbs (only an hour out) and its mostly houses and trees. a few more pans and you have nothing but forest. if you keep panning, you'll find yourself looking at mostly forest and farmland with the former prevailing. you may find an occasional city, but the vast of what you will find is nature for the next 1700 miles. by then you reached the rocky moutains and things start to get a bit drier. Nature is ok. nature is not dead. and as per comments bellow, you do not take two data points and extrapolate a linear prediction and expect anything meaningful. let alone from one small area in Germany, using a methodology that has not been widely tested. its certainly cause for additional research.

GVIrish 9y ago
That is a realllyy simplistic way of looking at things that doesn't at all speak to the issue at hand. Is there still lots of plant cover? Sure. But when you get into what types of environments are intact and healthy enough to support the normal fauna, we start to see problems. So there may be forest, but there may now be a tremendous drop in the amount of wildlife in the forest because the food chain has been badly damaged. Insects form the foundation of many ecosystems and massive drops in insect biomass would be devastating to all of the animals up that food chain. And there are a number of reasons insects can be disappearing from pesticides, to loss of specific species of plants, to air pollution. Even if we continue on our path of anthropomorphic mass extinctions, life on Earth will adapt and move on, that's not in question. But Earth may not be very hospitable for human kind if we don't change course.
fallingfrog 9y ago
I think what that misses though is that human growth has been exponential for some time now, and if it remains exponential then even if we've only tapped 12.5% of the earths productivity, we've only got 3 doublings left before we hit the proverbial wall. I think that it could be true that there is more nature left than we think, but also be true that there is less time left than we think.
- viggity 9y ago
  Ehrlich predicted worldwide famine in the 70s due to the population. he was wrong. Malthus predicted worldwide famine in the 18th century. he was wrong. Populations become more educated, have fewer children. The power of technology and bio technology grows at a far faster rate than population. In the 1920s an acre of land would get you about 40-50 bushels of corn. A short 100 years into the future and we're averaging 180-190. We have barely even scratched the service when it comes to advancing the base breeding stock with genetics. Biotech traits (roundup ready, etc) have given us a big boost, but they too are just the tip of the iceberg. CRISPR is going to make yields skyrocket. I know the news loves showing you doom and gloom, but really, humans have never had it better and it isn't going to stop. More awesome statistics here: http://www.humanprogress.org/ http://www.humanprogress.org/
  - fallingfrog 9y ago
    We're getting those crazy yields because of fossil fuel based fertilizer, which could be replaced but only by some other equivalent source of external nitrogen. My background is in physics, and in physics we deal with constraints- thermodynamics, conservation of energy, and so on. I'm telling you that no matter what technology we develop certain constraints are inescapable. Crop yields can only increase so much. If we restrict the domain of discussion to the surface of the earth, then we're left with limits. That doesn't necessarily imply a Malthusian scenario! But it means that we need to plan for a time when exponential growth is no longer the rule. I mean, there is nothing normal or sustainable about this wacky, unbalanced moment of time that we live in. I don't know how it ends- with a plateau or a bust- but sometime I would say this century it has to end. Look: if you assume 3% year on year productivity growth per person, in around 700 years every person is producing as much goods and services as all 7 billion of us do today. That's clearly preposterous. Your fingers could not move fast enough to write that much code, compose that much music, and your little human brain could not appreciate it all anyway if everyone was producing that much art, let alone all the physical work. The question is just how long we have left before that growth flattens out, and what happens next.
    - 9y ago

GVIrish 9y ago

That is a realllyy simplistic way of looking at things that doesn't at all speak to the issue at hand. Is there still lots of plant cover? Sure. But when you get into what types of environments are intact and healthy enough to support the normal fauna, we start to see problems. So there may be forest, but there may now be a tremendous drop in the amount of wildlife in the forest because the food chain has been badly damaged. Insects form the foundation of many ecosystems and massive drops in insect biomass would be devastating to all of the animals up that food chain. And there are a number of reasons insects can be disappearing from pesticides, to loss of specific species of plants, to air pollution. Even if we continue on our path of anthropomorphic mass extinctions, life on Earth will adapt and move on, that's not in question. But Earth may not be very hospitable for human kind if we don't change course.

fallingfrog 9y ago

I think what that misses though is that human growth has been exponential for some time now, and if it remains exponential then even if we've only tapped 12.5% of the earths productivity, we've only got 3 doublings left before we hit the proverbial wall. I think that it could be true that there is more nature left than we think, but also be true that there is less time left than we think.

viggity 9y ago
Ehrlich predicted worldwide famine in the 70s due to the population. he was wrong. Malthus predicted worldwide famine in the 18th century. he was wrong. Populations become more educated, have fewer children. The power of technology and bio technology grows at a far faster rate than population. In the 1920s an acre of land would get you about 40-50 bushels of corn. A short 100 years into the future and we're averaging 180-190. We have barely even scratched the service when it comes to advancing the base breeding stock with genetics. Biotech traits (roundup ready, etc) have given us a big boost, but they too are just the tip of the iceberg. CRISPR is going to make yields skyrocket. I know the news loves showing you doom and gloom, but really, humans have never had it better and it isn't going to stop. More awesome statistics here: http://www.humanprogress.org/ http://www.humanprogress.org/
- fallingfrog 9y ago
  We're getting those crazy yields because of fossil fuel based fertilizer, which could be replaced but only by some other equivalent source of external nitrogen. My background is in physics, and in physics we deal with constraints- thermodynamics, conservation of energy, and so on. I'm telling you that no matter what technology we develop certain constraints are inescapable. Crop yields can only increase so much. If we restrict the domain of discussion to the surface of the earth, then we're left with limits. That doesn't necessarily imply a Malthusian scenario! But it means that we need to plan for a time when exponential growth is no longer the rule. I mean, there is nothing normal or sustainable about this wacky, unbalanced moment of time that we live in. I don't know how it ends- with a plateau or a bust- but sometime I would say this century it has to end. Look: if you assume 3% year on year productivity growth per person, in around 700 years every person is producing as much goods and services as all 7 billion of us do today. That's clearly preposterous. Your fingers could not move fast enough to write that much code, compose that much music, and your little human brain could not appreciate it all anyway if everyone was producing that much art, let alone all the physical work. The question is just how long we have left before that growth flattens out, and what happens next.
  - 9y ago