Sublime

At the very least, the world is near the peak of agricultural land. And yet we continue to produce more and more food each year. There has been a global decoupling of agricultural land from food production.viii That is a momentous moment in our environmental history.

Recent good news is that the world’s forests have been a large and persistent carbon sink (storing more than they emit), locking away about 2.4 billion tons of carbon every year between 1990 and 2007, and satellite data for 2000–2017 indicate that one-third of the world’s vegetated area has been greening (showing a significant increase in the

environmental impact is a product of three things: population, affluence, and technology.

Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. •

Almost 1.8 billion tons of soil is eroded from U.S. cropland each year

The first shift is from measuring just what is sold to what is provided for free too.

In short, Earth’s carrying capacity is open to change – and this change could go in either direction. The human-carrying capacity of a world eating a plant-based diet is higher than a world of carnivores. Conversely, the deeper the climate change we provoke, the more difficult it will be to live and the lower this human-carrying capacity will go.

Here, Richard Heinberg and his team at the Post-Carbon Institute return from their deep dives into economic trends and energy metrics to tell us “the Game is over” and we