Thought I'd throw a quick movie your way; 4 years ago Johan Rockström, a professor at Stockholm University and (at the time of filming) the executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, gave a TED talk describing his 9 recently identified 'Planetary Boundaries'.
The boundaries represent limits on human impacts on the environment. Johan explains within these limits the earth can remain at a level that maintains our current global environmental state, whilst exceeding these limits (or possibly only a number of them) could cause an abrupt change in the global environmental state from which it is likely we could never return.
The talk immediately identifies human population growth as a primary pressure on the earth's environmental conditions and the identified planetary boundaries encompass the majority of the topics we have investigated so far. Although his talk takes a much wider global and temporal viewpoint than that of this blog, I think its a great piece of media that conveys how the issues we are investigating all contribute to a much larger problem.
Interestingly, although perhaps unsurprisingly, Johan suggests that many aspects of human impact need to be initially addressed on a smaller cultural scale which will then allow incremental improvements of our environmental impacts to combine and result in global scale changes. I think this is a valid observation; the solutions to excess nutrient pollution and fishery resource exploitation impacts I mentioned in earlier posts both appear to have their beginnings at grassroots level. Guidelines for the control of agriculturally derived water pollution, released last year by the FAO, noted that there has been ''considerable success'' (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations - Water Pollution Guidelines, page 13: 2013) in decreasing nutrient pollution through educating farmers in best practises and demonstrating financial savings through lower, correctly timed applications of fertiliser.
As yet we haven't broached the subject of 'reducing impacts' but I think this video offers us a great excuse to start looking at the more positive side of the subject in my next post.
Take care and don't stress about Christmas shopping to much.
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