Word: papers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...found myself thinking of those man-on-the-street interviews Sex and the City used during its first season, in which men copped to their hideous dating practices, seemingly for the sole purpose of churning up female disgust. It is difficult to imagine David Foster Wallace putting pen to paper with that intent...
That's the impact of breaching only one of nine planetary boundaries that Rockstrom identifies in the paper. Other boundaries involve freshwater overuse, the global agricultural cycle and ozone loss. In each case, he scans the state of science to find ecological limits that we can't violate, lest we risk passing a tipping point that could throw the planet out of whack for human beings. It's based on a theory that ecological change occurs not so much cumulatively, but suddenly, after invisible thresholds have been reached. Stay within the lines, and we might just be all right...
...paper offers a useful way of looking at the environment, especially for global policymakers. As the world grapples with climate change this week at the U.N. and G-20 summit, some clearly posted speed limits from scientists could help politicians craft global deals on carbon and other shared environmental threats. It's tough for negotiators to hammer out a new climate-change treaty unless they know just how much carbon needs to be cut to keep people safe. Rockstrom's work delineates the limits to human growth - economically, demographically, ecologically - that we transgress at our peril...
...still risk harming Earth. "Ongoing changes in global chemistry should alarm us about threats to the persistence of life on Earth, whether or not we cross a catastrophic threshold any time soon," writes William Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, in a commentary accompanying the Nature paper...
...early in the morning, and the September air was brisk as we sped up Western Avenue,” he wrote at the opening of Chapter 11 of “Authoritas,” “I was reading printed directions off a bright red sheet of paper. Unlike most streets where you had to strain your eyes to read any addresses at all, the numbers here were larger than life, almost two feet tall and bold, so that they looked like they might hurt if they fell...