The average human is 14x richer in material goods than 200 years ago. But if you combine that with an increase in population of over seven-fold (from 1 billion to 7.7 billion since 1800), the result is that our ‘pie’ is 100x larger than 2 centuries ago and 500x larger than 5 centuries ago . Our total pie (consumption) – which is the average pie slice size per human times the number of humans alive – is now hundreds of thousands of times larger than through most of history. TaaL: Today, a human aged just 65 has experienced two full doublings of Earth’s human population in her lifetime, so it seems normal. It’s anything but. It is roughly true that a human aged 65 has witnessed more energy use by your species in her lifetime than was used in the previous 300,000 years since your species became anatomically modern. The yeast in a sealed bottle of grape juice will make wine every time, because their genetic agenda is oblivious to the limitation inherent in the bottle. There’s good reason for this: yeast didn’t evolve inside wine bottles, so converting sugar to alcohol has normally worked out for them. It’s only a suicidal agenda when inside a sealed container with no other limits to growth. So how are humans an analogous case? Because in the last several generations you’ve switched what you eat from natural flow -based foods to, in effect, eating fossil carbon and hydrocarbons. These days, only one in ten calories embodied in your food system has originated in photosynthesis. Most of the nitrogen in your body’s proteins (~80%) originated in factories using a WW1 process to produce ammonia from natural gas. 157 Your great-
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