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Humanity’s Footprint

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Humanity’s Footprint

Momentum, Impact, and Our Global Environment

Columbia UP,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

What have we done to the planet? Global warming is real and its effects are devastating. The time for action is now.

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

Most of the natural systems that humans rely on for survival are in jeopardy. The earth’s resources are irrefutably finite. Science predicts dire consequences if humankind fails to initiate strategies to stem population growth and rampant consumption. Author Walter K. Dodds presents a worldwide perspective on global warming, including fascinating statistics about human resource use and its implications for the future. He examines the most potentially threatening effects of human behavior. To shed some new light, he offers solution-oriented insights from game theory, which studies the conditions under which people who are naturally pursuing their own self-interests will cooperate for the greater good. getAbstract recommends this guide to global warming issues.

Summary

“Collision Course”

No part of the planet is immune to human activity. Agricultural residues show up in deep-sea fish, forest fires rage in the Amazon, trash clutters every shore. “Humanity’s footprint” encapsulates the size and weight of humankind’s demands on the planet. Environmental degradation may have advanced beyond repair, although humans have the ability to “mitigate” many of these effects. What’s lacking is the determination.

The study of humanity’s impact on the natural world is relatively new. The numbers involved in calculating its global consequences are inconceivably large: More than 6.5 billion people live on earth, and many of the support systems they rely upon for sustenance already show significant depletion. This issue provokes “doom and gloom” forecasting on one extreme and an unjustified, magical faith in technology to save humans from themselves on the other. Though some people still dispute scientific reports of humanity’s environmental impact, most acknowledge it. People find it hard to understand the magnitude of humanity’s harm to the natural world and to modify their own behavior in response. Because negative consequences are minimized in...

About the Author

Walter K. Dodds is a biologist specializing in water ecosystems and a professor at Kansas State University. He heads the Kansas Ecological Forecasting Initiative. He wrote Freshwater Ecology: Concepts and Environmental Applications.

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