On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Ingrid <ingrid.srin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There is also the stark difference in risk attached to large population > concentrations in less-developed versus more-developed countries/regions : > http://www.preventionweb.net/files/9414_GARsummary.pdf > Apropos of nothing, and to aid thread drift, here an old piece by Ronald Bailey at Reason Magazine. http://www.reason.com/news/show/117481.html <snip> History has shown that people prefer the opportunities and excitement<http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/06109?gko=8ac57&tid=230&pg=all>of city life to rural idiocy. And the former country idiots are voting with their feet. While some people may be pushed by war or drought, or poverty into cities, most people today are pulled in by the prospect of reinventing themselves, escaping from the narrow strictures of family, class and community, and a shot at really making it. As humanity has urbanized, we have become ever less subject to nature's vagaries. For instance, a globally interconnected world made possible by the transportation networks between cities means that a crop failure in one place can be overcome by food imports from areas with bumper crops. Similarly resources of all types can be shifted quickly to ameliorate human emergencies caused by the random acts of a brutal insensate nature. Autonomy is just another word for freedom. The further good news is that the movement of humanity's burgeoning population into the thousand of megacities foreseen that Rifkin is part of a process that ultimately will leave more land for nature. Today cities occupy just 2 percent of the earth's surface, but that will likely double to 4 percent over the next half century. In order to avoid this ostensibly terrible fate Rifkin proclaims, "In the next phase of human history, we will need to find a way to reintegrate ourselves into the rest of the living Earth if we are to preserve our own species and conserve the planet for our fellow creatures." Actually, he's got it completely backwards. Humanity must not reintegrate into nature-that way lays disaster for humanity and nature. Instead we must make ourselves even more autonomous than we already are from her. Since nothing is more destructive of nature than poverty stricken subsistence farmers, boosting agricultural productivity is the key to the human retreat from wild nature. As Jesse Ausubel, the director for the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, points out: "If the world farmer reaches the average yield of today's US corn grower during the next 70 years, ten billion people eating as people now on average do will need only half of today's cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia." Similarly all of the world's industrial wood could be produced on an area that is less than 10 percent<http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/forestry/old_files/lectures/hall/2001sedjo/2001sedjo.html>of the world's forested area today leaving 90 percent of the world's forests for Nature. </snip> C -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/ravages http://www.linkedin.com/in/ravages http://www.selectiveamnesia.org/ +91-9884467463
