Total human biomass is "puny"

I've read several neo-Malthusian analyses on DU in which members argue that the human species is so numerous that simply providing nutrition for the human biomass strains the earth's resources. My view has generally been that while we are certainly straining the environment, food production to support the biomass isn't really our problem. Population growth is plummeting and total population is likely to level off and begin declining.

The real stress on the environment comes from all the "stuff" we in the west and rapidly developing parts of Asia acquire and use. Compare the amount of "stuff" in your apartment or house -- including the structure of the home itself, and your car, if you have one. Think of the trees used to make the walls, floors, books, and table tops; the plastics in your computer; the glass, metal and plaster.

Then compare that to what is in your kitchen cabinets and fridge (the actual food) -- net of all the useless, wasteful packaging. That is actually what it takes to support your human biomass. Which do you think puts more strain on the environment? Of course there is a hidden biomass -- the animals used to produce some of your food products and the biomass needed to feed those animals. But if we were vegetarians or more vegetarian, what you would see in your kitchen would be the biomass needed to support your nutritional needs.

The reason I was thinking about this is that this morning, I heard out of the corner of my ear, so to speak, something on the radio about the environment, and the speaker said that the actual human biomass is "puny," and could fit in one side canyon of the Grand Canyon.

A back of the envelope calculation confirms this. There are about 6 billion people alive today. At an average of 150 pounds, that is a total biomass of 900 billion pounds, or 450 million tons.

That sounds like a lot of biomass -- except when you start comparing it to other things. A google search shows that 450 million tons is the total volume of just Brazil's sugar harvest, alone. China produced 450 million tons of grain -- but also consumed 450 million tons of crude steel. The US produced 450 million tons of mining tailings, but that is only a part of the 1.8 billion tons total mineral extraction waste.

It's not the food that's the problem.

We need space...lots of it.

Compare the suburban house to the small city apartment. Some parts of our culture are more invasive than others.

I'm going stir crazy where I live. I need more space than I currently have. Predators also need sleep, which I'm not getting much of.

We forget our origins at our peril.

Easily

As "superior" animals, we've managed to invent and develop all these wonderful things to improve our lives (mostly in the last 100 years). However our brains and egos will eventually do us in if we can't get control of our waste.

And I am as guilty of accumulation as the next person.

I deliberately live in smaller spaces in order to impose a hard limit on the STUFF problem. But I still pile shit up.

Because you have to look at the rate at which earth can supply various goods and services. That rate is smaller than the gross biomass at any one time.

The best measure for pondering such things is "ecological footprint." Roughly: how many acres does it take to provide the "goods and services" we use.

The last estimate I heard was, humanity currently uses about 1.25 "earths" in aggregate. Of course, that number embodies a billion or so people who probably use something like 0.05 earth-equivalents, and some people like me, who use around 5 earth-equivalents.

If everybody like me were to cut our lifestyle by 80%, and magically distribute it evenly across humanity, we'd still be at around 1.0 earths total.

That's using the entire planet's goods and services, for one species. Let's say we cut the average human footprint to 0.25. In other words, to 5% of my current standard of living. That's 1/4 of the planet, for one species. With, as you say, a much smaller fraction of the biomass.

Which isn't to say that doing stuff like going vegetarian won't have an impact. It seems like a clear winner as a mitigation strategy, and I imagine economics will force the issue at some point. We are already seeing inflation of food prices.

How much "biomass" do all of the non-human critters use or consume?

the goods and services we draw from. If you take the viewpoint that there's "us" and "everything else," which includes the earth's crust, the biosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere, all of that stuff can provide "surplus" goods and services useable by humans at a certain rate. We are currently exceeding that rate by 1.25x.

If we were to back off to some other lower number, say 0.25, that would still be quite a lot of surplus for one species.

If you look at the bigger picture, the surplus available at any one time is normally used for the evolution of the biosphere. We are currently sucking all that up, and then some. Which manifests itself as an extinction event. Instead of biodiversity growing, it's shrinking. And the effect is nonlinear: we're exceeding the surplus by 25%, but the extinction rate is proceeding at something more like 1000x its normal background rate.

Stats PLEASE?

From the Wikipedia article on Ecological footprint:



There is some dispute about the concept of the ecological footprint, and over the question of carrying capacity in general. the concepts are quite open to redefinition, and so are in some sense as much political as ecological statements.

I, for instance, think that our use of the one-time gift of fossil fuels has enabled humanity to overshoot the true carrying capacity of the planet by about three to four hundred percent. In other words, in the absence of fossil fuels the carrying capacity of the planet would be 1.5 to 2 billion people with an average lifestyle similar to Portugal. The story is worse than that, though, because the overshoot enabled by the use of fossil fuels has allowed us to degrade the Earth's underlying carrying capacity without being adversely affected by it (e.g. we have killed the oceans and destroyed the topsoil, but the use of synthetic fertilizers has sustained food production so we haven't noticed the damage). Given that, the carrying capacity of the earth once the oil/gas/coal goes away in another century or so may be on the order of one billion people as opposed to the 6.6 billion there are now.

But hey, that's just one man's opinion...

Providing food for our puny biomass has put an extraordinary strain on some of the earth's resources - namely topsoil fertility and fresh water supplies.

Just yesterday we were treated to this statement from The Telegraph:

Soil fertility on the American Great Plains is now only half what it was 60 or 80 years ago years ago.

On the water side, there is the well-known problem of he Australian drought that has caved in this year's wheat harvest. Also, there's this evidence out of India: As of 2004 their farmers have used oil-well technology to drill 21 million tube wells for water, going down in many cases over 1000 feet. From those wells they extract 200 cubic kilometers of aquifer water for irrigation, every year.

In the USA, the Ogallala aquifer is being drained up to 100 times faster than it is being refilled.

Remember Liebig's Law of the Minimum: the growth of an organism is limited by the least available essential resource. There are significant weak links in the chain of food production.

They won't be a desert - it will still rain - but there won't be enough water for human use. Dryland farming is the answer but it ain't gonna happen.

I have no statistics for any of this, just the expereince of growing up on the plains. Hope someone can prove me wrong. And, btw, if you look at county by county votes across the plains, it's an almost total sea of red, redder even than the South.