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Our ecological footprint
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The article was published on 1996-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 1047 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Environmental adult education & Ecological footprint.read more
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The Human Footprint and the Last of the Wild
Eric W. Sanderson,Malanding S. Jaiteh,Marc A. Levy,Kent H. Redford,Antoinette V. Wannebo,Gillian Woolmer +5 more
Abstract: I Genesis, God blesses human beings and bids us to take dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, and every other living thing. We are entreated to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth, and subdue it (Gen. 1:28). The bad news, and the good news, is that we have almost succeeded. There is little debate in scientific circles about the importance of human influence on ecosystems. According to scientists’ reports, we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green material) produced on Earth each year (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001). We consume 35% of the productivity of the oceanic shelf (Pauly and Christensen 1995), and we use 60% of freshwater run-off (Postel et al. 1996). The unprecedented escalation in both human population and consumption in the 20th century has resulted in environmental crises never before encountered in the history of humankind and the world (McNeill 2000). E. O. Wilson (2002) claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if every human consumed at the level of the average US inhabitant. The influence of human beings on the planet has become so pervasive that it is hard to find adults in any country who have not seen the environment around them reduced in natural values during their lifetimes—woodlots converted to agriculture, agricultural lands converted to suburban development, suburban development converted to urban areas. The cumulative effect of these many local changes is the global phenomenon of human influence on nature, a new geological epoch some call the “anthropocene” (Steffen and Tyson 2001). Human influence is arguably the most important factor affecting life of all kinds in today’s world (Lande 1998, Terborgh 1999, Pimm 2001, UNEP 2001). Yet despite the broad consensus among biologists about the importance of human influence on nature, this phenomenon and its implications are not fully appreciated by the larger human community, which does not recognize them in its economic systems (Hall et al. 2001) or in most of its political decisions (Soulé and Terborgh 1999, Chapin et al. 2000). In part, this lack of appreciation may be due to scientists’ propensity to express themselves in terms like “appropriation of net primary productivity” or “exponential population growth,” abstractions that require some training to understand. It may be due to historical assumptions about and habits inherited from times when human beings, as a group, had dramatically less influence on the biosphere. Now the individual deci-
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Sustainable development: mapping different approaches
TL;DR: In this paper, a classification and mapping of different trends of thought on sustainable development, their political and policy frameworks and their attitudes towards change and means of change is presented, focusing on sustainable livelihoods and well-being rather than well-having.
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Water footprints of nations: Water use by people as a function of their consumption pattern
TL;DR: The water footprint of a country is defined as the volume of water needed for the production of the goods and services consumed by the inhabitants of the country as mentioned in this paper, which shows the extent of water use in relation to consumption of people.
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Categorising tools for sustainability assessment
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide a cohesive categorisation of the most common sustainability assessment tools within the broader objective of lifting the understanding of tools from the environmentally-focused realm to that of the wider concept of sustainability.
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Environment, economy and society : fitting them together into sustainable development
TL;DR: The authors argue that these are not unified entities: rather they are fractured and multi-layered and can be considered at different spatial levels, with the economy dependent on society and the environment while human existence and society are dependent on, and within the environment.