scholarly journals Aging Human Populations: Good for Us, Good for the Earth

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (11) ◽  
pp. 851-862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Götmark ◽  
Philip Cafaro ◽  
Jane O’Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 04-05
Author(s):  
Procopio Cocci

The objective of the ecological building instruction ought not just train understudies' natural information, the more significant thing is that it prepares understudies' natural ethics and structures the conduct which is good for the earth, and these must be shaped by training, in actuality. In the customary showing model of training, one instructor can just guide one practice simultaneously. With the improvement of organization innovation, instructor can control the distinctive practice exercises firing up in various areas or in various occasions by network. In light of the incorporation of viable need and intuitive qualities of condition instruction, the creator set forward an online domain training mode named "practice-intelligent partake in". The Core of this mode is to prepare understudies' natural ethics by training and to understand educators' guidance through organization.


1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (8) ◽  
pp. 365-365
Author(s):  
Harold D. Cardwell
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 671-687
Author(s):  
Eric D. Galbraith

Abstract. The study of humans has largely been carried out in isolation from the study of the non-human Earth system. This isolation has encouraged the development of incompatible philosophical, aspirational, and methodological approaches that have proven very difficult to integrate with those used for the non-human remainder of the Earth system. Here, an approach is laid out for the scientific study of the global human system that is intended to facilitate seamless integration with non-human processes by striving for a consistent physical basis, for which the name Earth system economics is proposed. The approach is typified by a foundation on state variables, central among which is the allocation of time amongst activities by human populations, and an orientation towards considering human experience. A framework is elaborated which parses the Earth system into six classes of state variables, including a neural structure class that underpins many essential features of humanity. A working example of the framework is then illustrated with a simple numerical model, considering a global population that is engaged in one of two waking activities: provisioning food or doing something else. The two activities are differentiated by their motivational factors, outcomes on state variables, and associated subjective experience. While the illustrative model is a gross simplification of reality, the results suggest how neural characteristics and subjective experience can emerge from model dynamics. The approach is intended to provide a flexible and widely applicable strategy for understanding the human–Earth system, appropriate for physically based assessments of the past and present, as well as contributing to long-term model projections that are naturally oriented towards improving human well-being.


Author(s):  
Richard Higgins ◽  
Richard Higgins
Keyword(s):  

The thousand fine points and tops of the trees delight me; they are the plumes and standards and bayonets of a host that marches to victory over the earth. The trees are handsome towards the heavens as well as up their boles; they are good for other things than boards and shingles....


Author(s):  
Anthony McMichael

As The Earth Warmed after the last glacial maximum, temperatures fluctuated. About 9700 B.C.E., temperatures rose again suddenly and began to stabilize, marking the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Holocene. The landscape continued to change, but not so fast that a single generation of humans would have noticed. Ice- sheets and tundra were receding in Eurasia, and over time human groups, both hunter- gatherers and then early farmer- pastoralist communities, adjusted their ways of living to warmer conditions and different rainfall patterns. Small- scale farming and herding emerged on all nonpolar con­tinents during the period 8500 to 6000 B.C.E., predominantly in the northern hemisphere, while human numbers were creeping up. These great changes in environmental conditions and subsequent cultural practices had a profound influence on the foundations of human health and survival: food sufficiency and quality, water sup­plies, contacts with infectious agents, modes of settlement, and social relations. A new era in human ecology was looming. Farming increased food production, but the switch to dependency on a few staples decreased diversity of diets and created an annual agricul­tural regime more susceptible to climate shifts. Close contact with animals, standing water in irrigated environments, and denser set­tlements provided opportunities for microbes, pathogens, viruses, and parasites to cross species barriers and infect and spread among human populations. During the Early Holocene, from about 9700 B.C.E. to 6000 B.C.E., the earth was subjected to the competing stresses of high solar influ­ence and still massive melting ice- sheets. From around 6000 B.C.E., the majority of ice- sheet melting had abated, allowing the stabiliza­tion of the Earth’s climate into what can be called the Mid- Holocene Climatic Optimum (approx. 6000 to 3000 B.C.E.). This was a change in climate that spanned 3,000 to 4,000 years. Warming was most evi­dent in the northern hemisphere, influenced by the peaking of solar radiation at higher northern latitudes as the 23,000- year Milankovitch “wobble” cycle maximized northern sun exposure for several millen­nia. The Milankovitch cycle also drew the rain- bearing Inter- Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) further north.


eTopia ◽  
2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Liboiron

In laymen’s terms, recycling is “good for the environment.” It involves “doing your bit” to help “save the Earth.” Yet, recycling requires high expenditures of energy and virgin materials, and produces pollutants, greenhouse gases and waste; it creates products that are “down-cycled” because they are not as robust as their predecessors, nor are such products usually recyclable themselves. Of the fifteen to thirty percent of recyclables that are retrieved from the waste stream, “almost half” are buried or burned due to contamination or market fluctuations that devalue recyclables over virgin materials (McDonough and Braungart, 56-60; Rogers, 176-179; Luke, 115-135; Rathje, 203-7;MacBride; Ackerman; EPA; Grassroots Recycling Network, Taxpayers for CommonSense, Materials Efficiency Project and Friends of the Earth). Furthermore, recycling infrastructure creates a framework where disposables become naturalized commodities instead of allowing practices of waste redesign, reduction or elimination. How is the schism between the popular perception of recycling as “good for the environment” and its less environmentally sound industrial processes maintained? By critiquing the visual culture of recycling campaigns, I argue that the meaning of recycling has been decontextualized, narrowed, and naturalized, thus functioning as a commodity sign.That is, recycling has been “abstracted from [its] context and then reframed in terms of the assumptions and interpretive rules of the advertising framework” through which it is promoted (Goldman, 5). I identify three main characteristics of the recycling commodity-sign. First, the individual, rather than government or industry, is represented as the primary unit of social change. Secondly, recycling is depicted as an act that ends at the blue bins, cutting out the industrial side of the cycle. Finally, recycling is symbolized as something that benefits the environment “in general” rather than as a specific form of waste management. Overall, I argue that recycling, instead of being a solution to environmental or waste crises, in fact constitutes a crisis of meaning that allows environmental degradation and derisory waste practices to continue.


Science ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 259 (5095) ◽  
pp. 639-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
LL Cavalli-Sforza ◽  
P Menozzi ◽  
A Piazza

Geographic expansions are caused by successful innovations, biological or cultural, that favor local growth and movement. They have had a powerful effect in determining the present patterns of human genetic geography. Modern human populations expanded rapidly across the Earth in the last 100,000 years. At the end of the Paleolithic (10,000 years ago) only a few islands and other areas were unoccupied. The number of inhabitants was then about one thousand times smaller than it is now. Population densities were low throughout the Paleolithic, and random genetic drift was therefore especially effective. Major genetic differences between living human groups must have evolved at that time. Population growths that began afterward, especially with the spread of agriculture, progressively reduced the drift in population and the resulting genetic differentiation. Genetic traces of the expansions that these growths determined are still recognizable.


Oryx ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bram Büscher ◽  
Robert Fletcher ◽  
Dan Brockington ◽  
Chris Sandbrook ◽  
William M. Adams ◽  
...  

AbstractWe question whether the increasingly popular, radical idea of turning half the Earth into a network of protected areas is either feasible or just. We argue that this Half-Earth plan would have widespread negative consequences for human populations and would not meet its conservation objectives. It offers no agenda for managing biodiversity within a human half of Earth. We call instead for alternative radical action that is both more effective and more equitable, focused directly on the main drivers of biodiversity loss by shifting the global economy from its current foundation in growth while simultaneously redressing inequality.


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