Biospheric Literacy 101
Public Node Active 2 years, 5 months ago
Ask yourself the following question: What should EVERY student, educator, undergraduate, policymaker, and citizen KNOW about our planet? (And notice how quickly a list of core principles, data sets, and understandings begins to almost automatically assemble itself.)
Topics this node hopes to address: How and why do population explosions occur? What is ecological release? How and why do massive population die-offs often occur in seemingly “vast open-space” surroundings that visually appear to remain mostly “empty?”
Secondly, Earth’s razor-thin surface films of atmosphere, oceans, soils, and seas both house (and comprise) the ONLY planetary life-support machinery so far known to exist anywhere in the universe. And examples of ecological services that we should not take for granted include phytoplankton producing sizable portions of the oxygen that we inhale every few seconds).
Thirdly, a graph of human population growth over the 10,000 years of civilization is an extreme and quite pronounced J-curve. (Think about the two famous J-curves (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that brought a sudden end to World War II. (As bad as those two J-curves were, they were at least relatively local in scale, while our own demographic J-curve is going off on a global scale in the middle of the ONLY planetary life-support machinery so far known to exist anywhere in the universe.)
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Dr Dominika Batista
joined 2 years, 5 months ago -
Ecological Literacy
joined 5 years, 7 months ago