DEVS 230 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Resource Productivity
25 Mar 2020
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Document Summary
Humans should seek to liberate the environment from the economy. Urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination are all processes with a demonstrated potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species. All though cities only occupy 1-3% of the world s surface more than half of the world"s population resides in them signifying a decoupling of humanity from nature. As this trend continues there is a need for higher harvest yields with less labour and land requirements. Past societies have had less impact on the land but only because they supported much smaller populations, if they had the same sized population as we do now their land footprint would be much higher. Increasing agricultural yields can reduce the conversion of forests and grasslands to farms. Less water is now needed for human survival, meaning the crops produced have a lower environmental impact because they do not use as much water.
