{"id":35061,"date":"2018-06-13T06:42:58","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T11:42:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35061"},"modified":"2018-06-13T06:42:58","modified_gmt":"2018-06-13T11:42:58","slug":"civilization-as-asteroid-humans-livestock-and-extinctions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35061","title":{"rendered":"Civilization as asteroid: humans, livestock, and extinctions"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"single-featured-image-header\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"attachment-twentyseventeen-featured-image size-twentyseventeen-featured-image wp-post-image\" src=\"https:\/\/www.darrinqualman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/Biomass-humans-livestock-wild-animals-e1527774939549.png\" sizes=\"auto, 100vw\" alt=\"Graph of biomass of humans, livestock, and wild animals\" width=\"640\" height=\"394\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"single-featured-image-caption\">Mass of humans, livestock, and wild animals (terrestrial mammals and birds)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"site-content-contain\">\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"site-content\">\n<div class=\"wrap\">\n<div id=\"primary\" class=\"content-area\">\n<article id=\"post-1113\" class=\"post-1113 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-environment-and-climate tag-agriculture tag-civilization tag-extinction tag-fossil-fuels tag-livestock tag-long-term tag-population\">\n<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.darrinqualman.com\/humans-livestock-extinctions\/\">Civilization as asteroid: humans, livestock, and extinctions<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Humans and our livestock now make up 97 percent of all animals on land.\u00a0 Wild animals (mammals and birds) have been reduced to a mere remnant: just 3 percent.\u00a0 This is based on mass.\u00a0 Humans and our domesticated animals outweigh all terrestrial wild mammals and birds 32-to-1.<\/p>\n<p>To clarify, if we add up the weights of all the people, cows, sheep, pigs, horses, dogs, chickens, turkeys, etc., that total is 32 times greater than the weight of all the wild terrestrial mammals and birds: all the elephants, mice, kangaroos, lions, raccoons, bats, bears, deer, wolves, moose, chickadees, herons, eagles, etc.\u00a0 A specific example is illuminating: the biomass of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.darrinqualman.com\/100-years-chicken-production\/\">chickens<\/a> is more than double the total mass of all other birds combined.<\/p>\n<p>Before the advent of agriculture and human civilizations, however, the opposite was the case: wild animals and birds dominated, and their numbers and mass were several times greater than their numbers and mass today. Before the advent of agriculture, about 11,000 years ago, humans made up just a tiny fraction of animal biomass, and domesticated livestock did not exist.\u00a0 The current situation\u2014the domination of the Earth by humans and our food animals\u2014is a relatively recent development.<\/p>\n<p>The preceding observations are based on a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/early\/2018\/05\/15\/1711842115.full.pdf\">May 2018 report<\/a> by Yinon Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo published in the academic journal <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em>.\u00a0 Bar-On and his coauthors use a variety of sources to construct a \u201ccensus of the biomass of Earth\u201d; they estimate the mass of all the plants, animals, insects, bacteria, and other living things on our planet.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mass of humans, livestock, and wild animals (terrestrial mammals and birds) Civilization as asteroid: humans, livestock, and extinctions Humans and our livestock now make up 97 percent of all animals on land.\u00a0 Wild animals (mammals and birds) have been reduced to a mere remnant: just 3 percent.\u00a0 This is based on mass.\u00a0 Humans and our [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[19933,287,1686,8003,20496],"class_list":["post-35061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-darrin-qualman","tag-extinction","tag-humans","tag-livestock","tag-wild-animals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35062,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35061\/revisions\/35062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}