From Peter H. Raven’s 2002 Presidential Address, American Association for the Advancement of Science:

Over 400 generations (10,000 years), our human population has grown from several million people to approximately 6.1 billion… We continue to depend on a series of ancient, genetically and socially determined habits and attitudes, many of which seem to have been more suitable for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We must adopt new ways of thinking that will serve our descendants well in a world that is crowded beyond imagining… unless, of course, we destroy ourselves.

The world has been converted in an instant of time from a wild natural one to one in which humans, one of an estimated 10 million or more species, are consuming, wasting, or diverting an estimated 45% of the total net biological productivity on land and using more than half of the renewable fresh water.

I encourage you to read Raven’s full address. Dovetailing well with the last article I posted here, it provides an informative survey of the ecological state of the world as of 2002, a vision for the future, and of the role of science in achieving that vision.

Having been exploring many of the topics on which Raven touches, I found especially interesting his discussion of the “false prophets and charlatans” who write books and appear in the media to tell us everything is okay. They include Bjørn Lomborg assuring us climate change is not human-caused, and Julian Simon who insisted further population growth should be welcomed.