At last 🙂 Here is evidence for what we’ve been saying all along. Thank you Steffen et al for digging out the data 🙂

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/15/rate-of-environmental-degradation-puts-life-on-earth-at-risk-say-scientists

For me personally this is even more ‘wonderful, amazing and several other adjectives’. Why? Because it is exactly my lifetime. I’ll also make the point, that perhaps is mentioned in these science papers, that the rate of change was not consistent over the period. When I was a child food and many other resources were still rationed (post-WW2 shortages), so even though we had Peace, we had very little else. Also very few people had cars, there were no such things as ‘package holidays’ or tourists. Few even travelled far beyond their own villages; no such thing as commuting. I lived in Singapore for a while: the flight from Britain took 5 days ~ we had to keep landing to refuel. In 1950 the global population was 3 billion (so it had doubled since 1900), however, much of it was still artisanal, low tech, buying local produce from local shops. Food prices were almost constant: my mother could give me the exact money for the things she asked me to buy from the shop. Somwhere around 1960 a ‘Wimpy-burger’ opened in Lincoln: it was a restaurant: tablecloths, real cutlery, waiter service … just a new product for us to enjoy. ‘Fast-food’ all came much later.

Let’s just say that I was alive at the birth of consumerism; have watched its first stumbling steps; then becoming established; then a problem; then a very ignorant, greedy and destructive force e.g. chopping down trees to convert into chipboard to make tables that fell to bits when wet); and now a plague intent upon its own destruction ::: but our planet is at stake. Probably the cockroaches, viruses and grass will survive ~ they always do 🙂

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