![]() The rise of the Impossible Burger, and similar plant-based fake meat that is starting to become indistinguishable from the real thing, can't come soon enough. If the whole world ate like China or India, with their mostly plant-based diets, we could return more than half of all agricultural land to nature (Opens in a new tab) tomorrow. We have transformed the entire surface of the planet - clear-cutting forests, fencing off swathes of acreage, killing off habitats for untold numbers of animals - because we are addicted to eating burgers alongside our fries. The vast majority of our diet comes from crops, which need only 11 million square kilometers - and even less in the future if vertical farming (Opens in a new tab), aka food grown in skyscrapers, takes off. But not all farmland is created equal: 40 million square kilometers is just for livestock, mostly cattle. So what's taking up the remaining space? Well, of the 104 million square kilometers of habitable land (Opens in a new tab) on this planet, agriculture takes up a stunning 51 million square kilometers. Even as suburban sprawl grows, we are becoming more compact overall: a 2008 study found 95 percent of humanity lives on 10 percent of the available land (Opens in a new tab). How realistic a goal is that? More than you might think - largely because we don't need as much space as you might expect.Ĭities take up a mere 3 percent (Opens in a new tab) of the planet's land surface, even though more than half of the world population now live in them (Opens in a new tab). If we can bring that number up to 50 percent of land and ocean, Wilson believes, then we should be able to avert a major mass extinction - and still have 85 percent of our current roster of species around in 2100. Given the scale of the crisis, Wilson writes, "conservationists haven't been thinking big enough." Some 15 percent of the planet's land and about 4 percent of its oceans are currently under some form of government protection, meaning you can't fish or farm or develop there. In other words, we're already living through a slow-motion Thanos snap - no supervillain required. He was spurred on by the estimate that half of all species on Earth will be extinct by the end of the century (Opens in a new tab). Building on a phrase coined (Opens in a new tab) by a Smithsonian magazine writer, Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet's Fight For Life in 2016, and established the Half-Earth Project the following year. It comes straight from one of the most respected names in biology, the multi-award-winning scientist and author E.O. We're already living through a slow-motion Thanos snap - no supervillain requiredĪs extreme as that sounds, the Half-Earth Project (Opens in a new tab) is for real. Instead of wiping out half of all the humans on Earth, let's remove all human activity from half of the Earth's surface. (Spoiler: It did.) There are many other ways in which the big purple guy didn't think his plan through: Experts say it would cause the collapse of entire ecological systems (Opens in a new tab), not to mention messing with the gut bacteria we can't live without.Īnd of course, if Thanos were really so concerned about limited natural resources, he could have just snapped his fingers and doubled them instead (Opens in a new tab).īut there is a surprising similarity between Thanos' goal and one of the most ambitious environmental proposals on the table - one that could help reverse climate change and prevent species extinction. This demi-genocide, he reasoned, would leave the remaining population with such abundant resources that there would be no more war, no more famine, no more societal collapse.Īfter Infinity War, I wrote about how Thanos made the same mistake as philosopher Thomas Malthus, who didn't think our ability to grow food would keep pace with a rising population. Thanos of Titan, the ultimate big bad in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, assembled the all-powerful Infinity Stones in his Infinity Gauntlet so he could eradicate 50 percent of all life in the cosmos, chosen at random, by snapping his fingers. ![]() Don't worry, this post is free of Avengers: Endgame spoilers.Īvengers: Endgame hits theaters this week, which means we're about to find out how Earth's greatest superheroes can reverse the destructive actions of the galaxy's most misguided environmentalist.
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