Humans Use 83 Percent of Earth's Surface

belloc writes "CNN is reporting on a Wildlife Conservation Society report that states that humans take up 83 percent of the Earth's land surface to live on, farm, mine or fish. The article rerers to a WCS human footprint map, but the WCS site seems to have been CNN'd. Funny: I just got back from a little road trip across the southwest, and from all the nothing you see out there, you would think that 83% is a bit high. I guess Arizona farmlands must look a lot like wild, untouched desert."

Comments

Humans really need

[teamhasnoi]

a predator. Sure there is war and famine, but nothing would thin the herd like a Aliens type predator. Just think! No more lazy good-for-nothings! No more excess! The gene pool would be strong again, and the weak would be killed and used against us.

Just like nature intended.

knock knock

[nanojath]

who is it?

land shark...

Shut up and RTFA.

[ArcSecond]

ZZZZZZ... go back to sleep. I bet those big words like "direct human influence" confused you. Don't worry your little head about the world's problems, puddin. You need your beauty rest.

Re:Statistics

[helix400]

Well, they are environmentalists, what do they care for scientific procedure? I still disagree with the figure.

Exactly. Environmentalists are activists first, and scientists last. Try this quote from the article:
"Formerly it was difficult to visualize this influence across the entire planet, but recent advances in the quality of geographic data now allow us to systematically measure human influence on the land's surface"

Really? You mean we couldn't get an accurate map of the world 10 years ago? Wow, I love environemtalism, its always on the leading edge of science...with all these new discoveries and all.

Living in Utah, I can look out my window right now and see that these maps are wrong. In map #1, it shows that there is virtually no area in the lower 48 states that doesn't have people on it. Like the poster of the article said...you can see lots of wilderness driving through the southwest. I don't know of too many cities on top of the 10,000 foot mountains next to our office, but according to the map there are
On map #2, it mentions very little in the lower 48 as qualifying as "wilderness". Amazingly, according to their map, the Great Salt Flats is not wilderness! Do you know how wide and empty those salt flats are? If you remember the movie Independence Day, they filmed the scene where Will Smith was dragging his alien behind him in the parachute out there. Yep, according to map #1, there's people living there, and according to map #2, its not wilderness.

Sadly, their only definition of wilderness in the Unites States is only land inside a national park, national monument, or national wilderess area. It doesn't have anything to do with the amount of people or development...it only matters if the government has given it that federal designation.