Having registered this website on the Blog Action Day, I’ll try to write here some notes about the environment.
Reading The Anthropocene I learnt that:
- the total biomass of the world’s population has increased to roughly 40 MTC (Megatons of carbon);
- the biomass of all wild vertebrates on land is roughly 5 MTC.
In other words, excluding animals that live in the sea, our weight is eight times that of our wild counterpart. This data is disturbing and it can be even more frightening if you think that a TC of first world humans certainly does not have the same impact on our planet as the same mass of, let me say, lions!
To summarise, my obvious proposal is to think twice before doing something that could increase our total MTC (making thoughtless sex is a core problem of course but it is not the only one).
In addition to blogging about the environment, the second way to participate in Blog Action Day was
donating your day’s earnings to an environmental charity
so I chose to join Rientro Dolce (”Mild Return”), which is
an association linked to Italian Radicals, which concerns itself with overpopulation, the environment and energy.
It seems that the MTC numbers come from papers written by Prof. Vaclav Smil.
Thanks to Luca Pardi for having suggested the references to me.
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