New Thoughts on the Impact of Humans on the Environment

The REALLY BIG picture issue related to population growth and development is the extent to which we are changing our physical landscape so much that we change human society in the process. It is a feedback loop, but one that is not yet well understood. The National Science Foundation recently funded a workshop on this topic at the University of Oregon, with the following ideas as background:

With world population projected to reach at least 9 billion by 2050, human interactions with landscapes are increasing at unprecedented rates. Indeed, the environmental impacts of human population growth and accompanying resource consumption have intensified to the extent that the term “anthropocene” has emerged to signify a new geologic era dominated by human activity. In the face of these impacts, including the installation and removal of dams, alteration of surface hydrology through urban development, and the transport of sediment from agriculture and other human interventions, workshop participants called for more attention to the effects of landscape change on individuals and societies, and for intensified efforts to develop predictive capacity for the effects of multiple stressors in human-landscape interactions.

I encourage you to read the online report from the workshop, since there are new and potentially very useful conceptual frameworks emerging from this work.