You are hereArchive - Nov 16, 2014
Archive - Nov 16, 2014
Humans depend on, and destroy (sad!), Nature: 88% original forest deforested; 50% Nature's non-human lives wiped out since 1970
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Washington Post: We’ve killed off half the world’s animals since 1970 - a jaw-dropping statistic
The new Living Planet Index report from the World Wildlife Fund opens with a jaw-dropping statistic: we've killed roughly half of the world's non-human vertebrate animal population since 1970.
The main culprits? Exploitation (i.e., overfishing and overhunting), and habitat degradation.
The declines are almost exclusively caused by humans' ever-increasing footprint on planet earth. "Humanity currently needs the regenerative capacity of 1.5 Earths to provide the ecological goods and services we use each year," according to the report. The only reason we're able to run above max capacity - for now - is that we're stripping away resources faster than we can replenish them. Carbon consumption - the burning of fossil fuels - represents a huge and growing chunk of the demand we put on the earth. "In 1961, carbon was 36 per cent of our total footprint, but by 2010 (the year for which the most complete dataset is available), it comprised 53 per cent." read more »