According to the Living Planet Report.....
In the US, Mexico, most of Central America, the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa, the footprint of man and his activities are 50% larger than biocapacity.

South America, Canada, sub Saharan Africa, Sibera, Australia, biocapacity is up to 50% larger than the human footprint.

A guy named Simms said, in an article in the Guardian newspaper in London.....
It is shockingly easy for politicians, economists, and planners to forget that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment......

THEN THERE ARE THE PLANNERS OF WORLD DOMINATION WHO DO NOT GIVE A FLYING FUCK. THEY CHOOSE TO DO WHATEVER THEY CHOOSE FOR GAIN, NOW, POWER, NOW, LIKE A BUNCH OF SERIOUSLY SPOILED NASTY 3 YEAR OLDS.

But, I will make you a bet that there is more than the Bush crime family and the Moonies buying up everything not already under lock and key in South America.

Latest debt for us citizens is over $7.4 Trillion
worth of interest and this Congress continues in denial of the truth or avoids it.
The Federal Reserve; privately owned by the Bank Cartel hold the T-Bills (IOU’s) can at their option hold or sell to control the economy to keep us tax payers in debt for centuries. It is very simple; if Congress created our currency (U.S. Constitutuion)we would owe no one for it. There would be no debt. That would very neatly eliminate the bill and taxes- and the Federal
Reserve and Bank Cartels.
There would be no need for war over other countries resources, water, oil, and Gold-Silver.
Our Earth would purify itself and the people would be disease free.
If there are any real scientists out there not paid by one of these greedy Corporations they know i speak the truth. our so called dollar is only worth the price of paper and ink it prints- about $.o4.

Great comments Kellina and lifewriter.

lw-ironic that the Department of Natural Resources’ acronym is DNR.  In my my profession it means ‘Do Not Resuscitate’.  And that is exactly what’s happening.  We, as an American culture, have forgotten conservation; personally, economically, and environmentally.

Not only does a very small percentage of Americans own their own home, but how many also live beyond their means (financial capability) due to the ease of credit cards?  Some day, the ‘house of cards’ that is our economy will fall.  And I predict it will make the Depression look like a walk in the park.  During the Depression, Americans still understood the necessity of common courtesy and respect; common sense and cooperation; sacrifice and sharing.  We don’t see those attributes practiced to any significant degree any more.

I used to think that the human animal practiced rational thought, discourse, and action.  In the last 12+ years, my hypothesis has been proven wrong.  Humans are not rational.  Those who are (and practice said characteristic) are a small minority.  A recessive gene, perhaps.  None the less, it bodes not well for our species.  My only hope for the tenacity of life is that the human animal becomes extinct before it takes all expressions of life with it.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling.

I agree that there is an elephant in the room, but I see a different one. The one I see is our refusal to even discuss the root causes of our environmental crisis: population, consumption, and income disparity.

Until we address these primary issues, we will continue increasing our demands upon a system which is ever less able to deliver--what you might call an accelerating spiral to the bottom.

In the mean time, we are just rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic as it were, continuing our theft from future generations while pretending to care for the earth.

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Having just returned from a Department of Natural Resources statewide meeting last week, I’m all too aware of species decline, of our world on the brink of mass extinction (see http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/06-52.htm for details on how these operate).  I remember marveling at the cavalier way in which DNR officials discussed the likelihood of species extinction as a matter of course.  Further compounding the problem, DNR staffers are so overburdened with examining deer heads for Chronic Wasting Disease, that there’s little time (and particularly money) to invest in hiring professional species surveying teams to quantify exactly what’s going on in our national forests (see http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/land/wildlife/whealth/i ssues/CWD/results.htm).

More unnerving than any of this is the odd reliance of “citizen scientists” on which the DNR has become dependent.  Calls for volunteer groups, citizens, and other interested parties to quantify what’s left of the native species of our nation is so low a priority that our Rangers can’t take on the task without relying 100% on civilian concerns.  Although this grassroots program does indeed get nature lovers out in the woods to marvel at red winged blackbirds, there’s an eerie feeling your left with, particularly, that the government just doesn’t care enough to fund this kind of critical research. 

We’ve plenty of cash to line to war chest in Iraq, and Afghanistan, but when it comes to conservation, we’ll leave that task to the simpletons that find in “interesting.” We’ve no time to lose, and we’re losing big.

http://www.worldwildlife.org/news/displayPR.cfm?prID=322 This is the story that you should read, not the BBC release.

There is an elephant in the room . . . why no discussion about peak oil? Oil and natural gas reserves are at or nearly at peak; we have four years perhaps before the rate of demand outstrips supply. No new big reserves are being found...oil companies don’t want you to know about it as their stock would plumment, etc.

Our whole way of life depends on oil that, in the last 100 years has fueled the industrial revolution. We now have about 5 billion too many people on the planet to go back to pre-industrial living without tremendous pain and suffering. It takes 10 calories of energy to produce every calorie of food. Think about it—oil is not just in our cars, it’s in the fertilizer, pesticides, every step of agriculture, harvest, distribution, manufacture, and sales.

Economic armageddon is around the corner. Do I sound extreme? Too much debt—only 2% of Americans own our own home outright. Do you have an interest-only loan on your house? An ARM? Watch out. We have nothing to export but dollars; if countries (like all the ones coicidentally America is now angry with—Venezuela, Iran, Iraq before the war, N. Korea, etc.) trade in Euros instead of dollars, then the gig is up.

We wage war in America to pile up debt to prop up the dollar. The US appears to be conducting war to grab the oil (Afghanistan for poppies and pipelines; Iraq, Iran, soon Saudi Arabia, etc.), but it’s really about saving the dollar.
With the coming oil shocks (much worse than in the 70’s because it’s going to be permanent), the dollar will plummet, stocks will become worthless, the housing bubble will burst, and we won’t have enough gas to get to work (if we still have jobs) or to the stores, even if there were food on the shelves. Did your parents or grandparents tell you about the Depression?

Maybe if enough people know about this, then we can start to say “NO—don’t spend 448 billion on the defense budget when we can spend a fraction of that and install wind turbines [like the Netherlands] and be energy-independent”...let’s at least have a discussion instead of being goaded, harassed, or killed as a means to get us to go to yet another war over a way of life that has to change eventually anyway.

Is anyone listening? At least when the oil is gone, the whales and other creatures can repopulate themselves...given we don’t set off too many nuclear bombs.