We need to live in harmony with Nature. This kind of awareness (hard metrics) has to be fed back into our decision making to do it. I believe we can support current population density with ecological enrichment through "applied ecology", e.g. Permaculture, etc. but only if we are aware of the need and priority.<p>---<p>For example see David Blume's concept for small-scale organic alcohol fuel production integrated with Permaculture food production. <a href="http://permaculture.com/node/518" rel="nofollow">http://permaculture.com/node/518</a><p>Not to give away (part of) the punchline, but the on-site extraction and distillation of the fuel retains all the trace elements, minerals, etc. The molecules in the fuel have come from the air and water, their energy-holding arrangement has been paid for by the Sun. The farm exports sunlight in fluid form.<p>As part of an integrated agriculturally-productive ecosystem alcohol fuel production just makes sense. The economics are totally different from large-scale ethanol, for instance.
Very nicely made tool, unfortunately they forgot that red/green colorblindness is very common, so I can't really see anything in their graphs.<p>Shouldn't be hard to add a little menu that allows you to choose the color themes, so color blind people can select one where they actually see a difference between the regions.
Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot print?
A trading nation by roots, is it even possible to get to 0 deficit?
The fundamental problem with Malthusianism is that it is static thinking. It projects on the basis of no change in technology, as if the present moment continues eternally. This is why all statements to date on running out of X or Y at time T in the future have proven false. What actually happens is that people look ahead, forecast increased prices for X, and then the more adventurous go and build a better way of getting X, or create a different resource X1 that can be used instead.<p>It is never different this time.<p>Arguably alarmism that fails to consider technological process is a necessary part of the signaling mechanism by which realistic price forecasts are established, an example of the market performing its usual strange alchemy in turning (often willful) ignorance into something useful, but that doesn't stop it from being frustrating.
>Singapore: 16000%<p>So the takeaway from this is you should aim for high biocapacity deficit, right?<p>I mean, I live in a deep green country, and it's a filthy dump.
Great visualisation. It's good to focus on the stocks instead of the flows.<p>"to feed the continued growth in industrial output there must be ever-increasing use of resources. But resources become more expensive to obtain as they are used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall [...]<p>As pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate" [1]<p>"Broadly stated, most ecological problems reduce to a single problem of balancing supply and demand." [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/info/quotes.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/info/quotes.html</a>
"Ideal" growth of an economy is 3%. Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore, etc). Compound growth takes more and more resources over the whole planet. Free market fundamentalism means we're not investing so heavily into alternative sources but burning what we've got. Compound that 3% and it's just a metter when we'll be fucked unless things change a lot.
"We are fucked"
For constantly being alarmist and crying wolf? Yes.<p>Anyways, what happened to the editorial rule here where the title was supposed to match TFA's title?<p>EDIT: Title has been appropriately edited. Thank you.
So what are the real options of survival?<p>a) accelerate migration to Mars<p>b) population control?<p>Anything else we can do to prevent "fucked"?
Many of the countries marked deep green (having higher biocapacity than ecological footprint) have been trending downwards for the past twenty years. The rate at which the biocapacity is diminishing appears to be slowing. But it makes me wonder if there is a way to visualize rates of decline as well.<p>I also wonder if there is a way to divide this up into spatial buckets so we could see say, the footprint of a metropolitan area versus other parts of the country. While national policies have affect on this, ecological impact is not necessarily confined to political borders.
One of the issues with ranking by percentage is it biases in favor of smaller nations because they're more likely to be anomalous. Notice how the countries at the top and bottom are both small.
Consider this:
In 1950, population was 2.5 billion.<p>In 2000, 6 billion (i.e: 2.4x in only 50 years)<p>In 2010, 7 billion (16% growth in only 10 years)<p>Is this sustainable? clearly not the way things are right now.
There is a high negative correlation between ecological and monetary wealth. Time to choose.<p>btw southern hemisphere looks good on this measure. As a bonus, zero nukes, and low likelihood of being an attractive target.
I'm pretty sick of all that hype around Tesla for example, pretending to be the real solution for independence of oil and gas. That is simply not the case. Tesla hasn't solved any of those issues so far, they only shifted the problem once again. Of course they design very beautiful electronic cars, but this isn't a solution for our energy and resource problem either.
> A national ecological deficit means that the nation is importing biocapacity through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere.<p>Before we had this trade and industrial activity that outputs all of this carbon dioxide waste life spans of humans were 3 times shorter than today.<p>And by the way the world population was also 8 times smaller, meaning that we today by altering the ecosystem of the world can feed a population that was unfathomable a 100 years ago.<p>I'm not a proponent of producing waste that harms us without any limits or regulations, but these people that simply cannot accept that human activity changes the worlds ecosystem for human benefit seem like fanatics to me.<p>If we give in to this then I can assure you that we in the West will be conquered by others and rightly so, because our culture has become retarded to a degree that it inhibits our ability to develop technologically, economically and culturally.<p>I'm pretty sure the Chinese will not stop developing to save some frogs, if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us. (not physically but from an economic and technological perspective)