Crazy stats

I am currently reading the Ingenuity Gap by Homer Dixon (who is teaching at the University of Toronto). So far, his book is entertaining, but hasn't really given me that much new insights - however it did provide me with a few new stats that I found very interesting.

1) The biggest human structure in the world is now the Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill site. It's a hundred meters tall and one square kilometer big! (Incidentally, it's also the finally resting place for the debris from the World Trade Centre). It was closed by Rudy Giuliani in 2001.

2) In highly industrialized countries, production of goods and services require over 80 metric tonnes of natural resources per person per year! (Includes things we often don't think about, like soil erosion as a result of intensive farming, and road/infrastructure-building. (Homer Dixon's reference is: Adriannse, et al. Resource flows, 23. He doesn't provide a literature list with more details.)

3) If you took all the people in the world, and spread them evenly on the non-ice covered habitable surface on the globe, each person would be within a hundred meters of everybody else! (To me, this was the most surprising one - perhaps not if you think rationally about it, and I guess it's only about dividing two publicly known figures with each other (dry land and population), but it somehow never struck me.

To me, the last fact is also telling me that although dreams of humans "going back to nature", everyone living on their own little farm, producing enough to support themselves and trading with the neighbours with neccessary, is not a viable ecological solution to the world's malaise - we would simply take over all the land in the world! I would actually much rather have a bunch of people in a skyscraper in downtown Toronto, and large areas of "untouched" nature, rather then a 100m2 plot for each of us.

Stian