Consumerism is 'eating the future'

New Scientist, August 2009 by Andy Coghlan

We're a gloomy lot, with many of us insisting that there's nothing we can do personally about global warming, or that the human race is over-running the planet like a plague.

But according to leading ecologists speaking this week in Albuquerque at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, few of us realise that the main cause of the current environmental crisis is human nature.

More specifically, all we're doing is what all other creatures have ever done to survive, expanding into whatever territory is available and using up whatever resources are available, just like a bacterial culture growing in a Petri dish till all the nutrients are used up. What happens then, of course, is that the bugs then die in a sea of their own waste.

One speaker in Albuquerque, epidemiologist Warren Hern of the University of Colorado at Boulder, even likened the expansion of human cities to the growth and spread of cancer, predicting "death" of the Earth in about 2025. He points out that like the accelerated growth of a cancer, the human population has quadrupled in the past 100 years, and at this rate will reach a size in 2025 that leads to global collapse and catastrophe.

But there's worse. Not only are we simply doing what all creatures do: we're doing it better. In recent times we're doing it even faster because of changes in society that encourage and celebrate conspicuous and excessive consumption.

"Biologists have shown that it's a natural tendency of living creatures to fill up all available habitat and use up all available resources," says William Rees of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "That's what underlies Darwinian evolution, and species that do it best are the ones that survive, but we do it better than any other species," he told me prior to the conference.

Task 9. Cohesion is achieved by several methods, such as the use of conjunctions. Another is the linking of phrases and sentences with words like he, they and that which refer back to something mentioned before. Read the following paragraph and complete the table.

Jenkins (1987) has researched the life cycle of new businesses. He found that they have an average life of only 4.7 years. This is due to two main reasons; one economic and one social. The former appears to be a lack of capital, the latter a failure to carry out suf.cient market research. Jenkins considers that together these account for approximately 70% of business failures.

Jenkins	he
new businesses
average life of only 4.7 years
one economic
one social
the former…, the latter…

Task 10. Read the article and complete the table below to show what the reference words (in italic) refer to.

Now fly me to the asteroids as well

• New Scientist, 22 March 2007 by David Shiga

They are still a long way from returning to the moon, but NASA is already thinking about sending astronauts to an asteroid. Such a mission could be accomplished using the same spacecraft and launch vehicle being designed to take Americans back to the moon.

"This would be the first time that humans go outside of the Earth-moon system," says Paul Abell of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

About two years ago, NASA started work on a new crew capsule and rocket to send astronauts to the moon by 2020 (New Scientist, 11 August 2005, p 6). Now, Abell and his team say that the Orion capsule and Ares rocket could also take humans to one of the many asteroids with orbits that bring them near Earth.

The team's analysis shows that the mission would require less fuel than going to the moon, because the vastly weaker gravity of an asteroid means hardly any effort is needed to escape its tug on the way back. Also, because of the weaker gravity, Orion would be able to simply hover close to the asteroid, and thus dispense with a lander, making for a lighter mission overall.

A round trip to a 30-metre asteroid called 1998 KY26, for example, which will pass by Earth in 2013 and 2024, could be completed in three months. However, 1998 KY26's relatively rapid spin may make it an undesirable candidate. The team expects that ongoing asteroid searches will identify more suitable targets.

Besides studying the structural properties of the asteroid using radar sounding - important if we ever needed to deflect such an asteroid - the mission would serve as a testing ground for a mission to Mars. It would be a "baby step towards Mars", says team member Robert Landis, adding that going to an asteroid is not meant to replace going back to the moon.

Any asteroid mission faces two major challenges. One is ensuring there is enough water, oxygen and food to sustain the crew on such a long mission. The lunar version of Orion is designed to carry enough supplies to support a crew of four for two weeks. Abell's team believes that the spacecraft can be reconfigured to carry just two or three, increasing the weight that can be used for supplies.

The second issue is the radiation hazard from cosmic rays and solar flares, which can put astronauts at increased risk of developing cancer. "I see no easy way to mitigate the problem on this mission except to make the duration as short as possible," says David Smith of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who is not part of the team. The astronauts might just have to accept the increased risk, he says.

Landis says the crew's water supply could be used as a shield against the radiation, and that their waste could be saved for the same purpose, but the team admits that radiation remains a challenge. "It's one of the issues we'll have to address," Abell says.

Abell presented the idea at last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

	They (par.1)
	Such a mission (par.1)
	its (par.4)
	which (par. 5)
	it (par. 5)
	It (par. 6)
	One (par. 7)
	which (par.8)
	he (par. 8)
	their (par. 9)