Milestone

When I first read the headline, I thought “Well, that’s a bit sensationalist.” That’s because I was reading the word ‘biomass’ and I was thinking ‘mass.’ Obviously, no matter how many buildings and roads we layer the planet with, it’s not going to outweigh the mass of the planet. The planet is way thick, and made out of solid rock.
Having read the article, it’s still kind of scary, but it doesn’t tell us much we don’t know. Human beings are a blight on the planet, we destroy the environment and, unless we stop it, we ourselves will be stopped. Things have limits, and our biospheres limits are being tested harder and harder. At some point it will break.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that human constructs outweigh the total biomass of the planet. We live in a world of our own construction and, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the environment in which we evolved, I’m not against it. I enjoy living in buildings, and all the other little luxuries human technology has to offer.
Still, it’s a major milestone, and a sign that we have gone too far and should do a U turn. How, is the question.
A bit of minimalism might go a long way. Pretty much everybody in the developed world has more junk than they need. Also, a bit of co-operation. More trains and buses would reduce the number of cars on the road, for sure. Reducing our population would be a good thing, because although humans themselves count into the biomass, most of us own products that outweigh ourselves, by quite a bit. Our little car outweighs our entire family. And increasing the biomass by planting about a billion trees, and converting a lot of our deserts into vegetable gardens, would also help.