Word: ecosystems
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That may seem impossible, but it's not unprecedented. In nature, Liss points out, there is no such thing as waste. What dies or is discarded from one part of an ecosystem nourishes another part. Liss says humanity can emulate nature's garbage-free ways, but it will require innovative technology and a big change in attitude...
...species. With the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, we became the first species in the 3.7 billion-year history of life not to be living as small populations off the natural fat of the land. Taking food production into our own hands, we stepped outside the local ecosystem. All but a few cultivated plants became weeds, and all but a few domesticated herds, pets and game animals became pests and vermin...
...short, we declared open war on the very local ecosystems that had until then been our home. As preagricultural hunter-gatherers, we humans held niches in ecosystems, and those niches, resource-limited as they always were, had indeed kept our numbers down. Estimates vary, but a figure of roughly 6 million people on Earth at the beginning of agriculture is reasonable. By 1798 the population reached 900 million. Agriculture altered how we related to the natural world and, in liberating us from the confines of the local ecosystem, removed the Malthusian lid in one fell swoop...
...think, find the inner will to wake up to our current situation, to see the grimmer outlook around the corner and to choose to do something about it. We can stabilize our numbers and temper our patterns of consumption. We can work to stem the tide of ecosystem destruction and species loss. We can, in short, see ourselves for what we have become: the first global economic entity, a fascinating state arrived at through no end of cleverness but a state that is ultimately limited by the health and productivity of the natural system in which we live...
...foot, left foot, repeat as desired. But as anyone who had to cut a swath through regatta spectators this past weekend can attest, it's a jungle out there. To aid the National Geographic Explorer in all of us, here are the four most prolific inhabitants of this particular ecosystem...