Steven A. Lawrence wrote:
<<That's incredible!
Of course, you're correct, and it's simple arithmetic, but I had never
seen it expressed that way before. That's just 5.5 acres of dry land
per person -- and if you leave out desert, ice caps, mountaintops, and
other marginal land it's even less.>>
I'm amazed these figures aren't more widely known. Take a look at this from
the BBC which is based on the United Nations Environment programme GEO4
report from 2007 which sort of references them.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/629/629/7056601.stm
It shows how many hectares per person we have and how it has been shrinking
over the years. Up until I saw the GEO4 report, I hadn't seen anyone else
had done this calculation. I first did it back when we had a population of
about 3.6 billion - round about 1970 - when I was still at school. When
people in the late 60's had raised concerns about overpopulation in the
future, scoffers (deniers!) worked out that the entire world's population
could squeeze onto the Isle of Wight (off England's South coast - about 147
square miles in area), thus making the world back then appear a pretty roomy
place. I did the complementary calculation at the time (no calculators
then...) and discovered that if the global population was evenly distributed
over the land surface of Earth, then each person would only have an area of
land 220 yards square as their personal environmental space! Obviously some
of this area would be hostile desert, ice fields, mountains, rainforest etc.
The world suddenly looked rather cramped. I even wrote a poem featuring the
figure (and blue whales and advertising) - excerpt follows - "the population
is in a jam, two hundreds yards square for every man"!
Nick Palmer
On the side of the Planet - and the people - because they're worth it
