GEOL 001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Lithosphere, Plate Tectonics, Anthropocene
7 Oct 2018
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Document Summary
People in north america,western europe, australia, and japan (15% of the global population) consume 30x more resources than people living in the third world. To bring the entire global population up to our standard of living would require an elevenfold increase in resource availability (equivalent to the resource needs of 77 billion people at current levels! Global modernization and raising the standard of living to bring billions out of poverty will place enormous new resource and energy demands on our planet. Meeting existing demands for living space, resources and energy is already causing profound changes to our planet and the earth systems that sustain humanity. Anthropocene: the age when humans are a dominant planetary force. * we are pushing different earth systems into ways they aren"t supposed to be, which is detrimental for our species. 36% of habitable land area on earth is now devoted to human food production (cropland and pastureland).
