7B_Sustainability

Tragedy of the Commons (if there is no governance and no rights to a particular resource, then people will exploit it)

Earth resources needed: - water (many environmentalists think the water crisis will come before the fuel crisis) - air - arable land - fuel

How many people can our earth support? (how sustainable is our life style?) - population of humans on earth increasing at an exponential rate - 7 billion by 2015 - 80% in developing countries - 95% of all growth in developing countries - 800 million people cannot afford two meals - about 30,000 people, half of them children, die every day due to hunger and malnutrition - nearly 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day

"In the next 50 years, mankind will consume as much food as we have consumed since the beginning of agriculture 10,000 years ago- Clive James." Chairman, ISAAA

(http://rgsbio09.wikispaces.com/)

--- Human's role -> Cause -> Sequence of events -> Ecological impact -> solution remedy & consequences

BIODIVERSITY - Centre for Tropical Forest Study (CTFS) - 6% of the world is forest. This 6% contains 50% of the world's biodiversity - why? - diversity and specialization (eg. fig and wasp - only a certain species can pollinate it) - gap + forest + edge - forest dynamics (patchwork) - tropics: rare (85%) and common (15%) vs temperate: rare (20%) and common (80%)

Examples (do it sequentially) In Indonesia, there are areas that only has Acacia trees, for the production of paper. In Canada, due to climate change, the winter is shorter and summer is prolonged, so the beetles thrive, and the coniferous forests have brown patches from the beetles thriving.

(Dead zones: Nutrient rich water and sediment from the nation's agriculture runoff travels downriver and is dumped into the Gulf. Various species of single-celled plant organisms flourish in these waters rich with chemical nutrients, and vastly deplete the oxygen in that area. Oil-eating microbes use a lot of oxygen.)