terra em excesso

Earth is too crowded for Utopia
The global population is higher than the Earth can sustain, argues the Director of the British Antarctic Survey in the first of a series of environmental opinion pieces on the BBC News website entitled The Green Room. Solving environmental problems such as climate change is going to be impossible without tackling the issue, he says.

The welfare and quality of life of future generations will be the ineluctable casualty Ten thousand delegates attended the recent Montreal Summit on the control of carbon emissions "beyond Kyoto". That's a lot of people! The conference organisation must have been daunting; and just imagine arranging the hotel accommodation and restaurant facilities and dealing with the additional human-generated waste.
Imagine the carbon and nitrogen emissions from the associated air travel! The 40 or more decisions made were announced as an historic success.
Supposing this proves to be so, will it be sufficient to secure an acceptable quality of life for the generations to come?
What about the myriad other planetary-scale human impacts - for example on land cover, the water cycle, the health of ecosystems, and biodiversity?
What about our release of other chemicals into the environment?
What about our massive transport and mixing of biological material worldwide, and our unsustainable consumption of resources?
mais in BBC, por Professor Chris Rapley, director do British Antarctic Survey

British Antarctic Survey
United Nations population division