Now this is what I call magnificent writing in the
sprit of Swift: Sean Corrigan riffs on peak oil, finite resources
and the planet's carrying capacity:
It is much better to forget all that Sierra
Club/WWF elitist, anti-mankind, horse manure about 'the call on the
planet' exerted by us members of the 'plague species' and to take a
little Bjorn Lomberg, a smattering of Julian Simon, and a
riffle-through of Matt Ridley, regarding the minuscule size of the
impact which our tiny little ilk - unimaginably outweighed by
living forms we cannot even see - can really expect to exert on the
vast, negatively-feedbacked rock which we inhabit-and to glory in
the sustained quality of our response to the challenges which
confront us, even under the far-from-ideal conditions under which
we are usually asked to make it.
For example, just as an exercise in
contextualisation, consider the following:-
The population of Hong Kong: 7 million. Its
surface area: 1,100 km2
The population of the World: nigh on 7
billion, i.e., HK x 1000
1000 x area of HK = 110,000 km2 = the area of
Cuba or Iceland
Approximate area of the Earth's landmass =
150 million km2
Approximate total surface area = 520
million km2
So, were we to build one, vast city of the
same population density as Hong Kong to cover the entirety of
Fidel's little fiefdom (not necessarily a Blade Runner vision of
hell), this would accommodate all of humanity, and
take up just 0.07% of the planet's land area and 0.02% of the
Earth's surface.
Add in another patch or two for energy
generation and maybe another few for growing food - perhaps by
building super-efficient, CO₂-enriched, drip-irrigated, skyscraper
hydroponics factories, by exploiting the potential of the
surrounding oceans more fully, or by bioengineering photosynthetic
bugs to grow us pure nutrients - and this would partition
dear old Spaceship Earth thus: six or seven bits for us weakling,
co-operative mutualists and 4,720 bits for all the unimaginable
cornucopia of other species to wax and wane at each other's
red-in-tooth-and-claw expense, undisturbed by human hand.
Not such a bad ratio, you might think, even
if you are a Marquis de Sade, equal-rights-for-plants-and-animals
(plague bacilli and malarial parasites?), super-egalitarian
nutcase.
Read the whole thing.
