Sightline Daily has some interesting numbers up on the relative biomass of human beings, domesticated animals, and wild animals. Apparently, just humans have eight times as much mass as all the wild vertebrates on land. Our mass approximately equals that of all the fish and whales in the ocean. Things are even more dramatic when you factor in domesticated animals. They contain 100 megatonnes of carbon – 20 times as much as there is in all the wild vertebrates on land.
The figures certainly make you think about ecological footprints in a more direct way. They also say something about energy. It seems fair to say that one major factor affecting the total biomass of wild animals is the amount of energy they are able to access. To what extent does our inflated biomass result from unsustainable energy use? Will we be able to maintain it when we can no longer count on ever-increasing production of fossil fuels?
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Is this a disguised and PC way of talking about over-population?
Clearly, it relates to population.
Even so, I thought it was a different enough presentation to be worth noting. Somehow “as massive as all the fish and whales in the sea” seems more tangible than “6.7 billion.” It also gives one a sense of why we are proving so effective at stripping the seas of life.
“To what extent does our inflated biomass result from unsustainable energy use?”
Our inflated biomass results almost entirely from the synthesization of ammonia, which is the basis for artificial fertilizer. The patent for the process was filed 100 years ago this month, in the most important scientific advance of the 20th century, by the German chemist Fritz Haber. The population increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6.5 billion today is due in the main to the Haber-Bosch process, which broke the Malthusian bounds on food production.
Synthetic ammonia is made by combining hydrogen derived from petroleum or natural gas with nitrogen in the atmosphere, and requires large amounts of energy, also usually produced using petroleum or natural gas, so the answer to your question is, “to a very large extent.”
see, e.g.,
http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news/news_archive/2008_news_item_35.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080929095708.htm
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/index.html
Ammonia synthesis is described at some length in: Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century
Given how most fertilizers are produced from fossil fuels, they represent yet another way in which hydrocarbon dependence makes our society unsustainable.
Those human biomass figures could go up a lot; by 2100, the United States may have one billion inhabitants.