Word: planetful
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With 6.1 billion people relying on the resources of the same small planet, we're coming to realize that we're drawing from a finite account. The amount of crops, animals and other biomatter we extract from the earth each year exceeds what the planet can replace by an estimated 20%, meaning it takes 14.4 months to replenish what we use in 12--deficit spending of the worst kind. Sustainable development works to reverse that, to expand the resource base and adjust how we use it so we're living off biological interest without ever touching principal. "The old environmental...
...preserve nature's bountiful variety in a world too vulnerable to humanity's penchant for standardization. She counsels us to be more humble in the care of our environment. "You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder," she says. "It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you." --By Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi
...answer to what ails the world. In 2002 that illness is--in many respects--worse. But if Rio's goal was to stamp out the disease of environmental degradation, Johannesburg's appears to be subtler--and perhaps better: treating the patient a bit at a time, until the planet as a whole at last gets well...
Could there ever be a system that is perfectly efficient? Actually, yes. It already exists, as old as the planet. We call it nature. In the natural system, there is no waste, only food for the decomposers. And the same materials have been recycled for billions of years. The new industrial revolution is all about absorbing the lessons we should have learned from nature long...
Wilderness, in the elegant words of the 1964 U.S. Wilderness Act, is land "where man himself is a visitor and does not remain." Wilderness areas are critical for protecting biodiversity: tropical rain forests alone, which cover 6% of the planet's land area, are home to more than half of all known species. But many wild regions suffer from human encroachment, and species are vanishing at a rate not seen since the demise of the dinosaurs. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, along with Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, who set up the Whole Earth Catalog, among others...