Sir David Attenborough wrong on "human plague"

2013-01-22

Bjorn Lomborg challenges Sir David Attenborough's notion of humans being a “plague on the Earth” and insists that the planet can sustain a much bigger population thanks to innovation.

"He argues that new technologies mean that humans need less land to produce food. Therefore the population can grow without harming wildlife and as people become richer it may even be possible to return degraded land to wildlife."

On his Facebook page, Bjorn analyses that “we are not running out of ‘places to grow food for this enormous horde.’ Actually, FAO estimates that globally we will not need much more space to grow our food -- less than 5% by 2050 (http://bit.ly/4ChrEt), because of our dramatic increase in productivity. And the graph above here shows that we may already have reached the peak farming area, as innovation and conservation will work to feed the world ever better, while setting more and more space off for nature (http://bit.ly/UhjwoD). Also, notice that the total land area usable for agriculture is about 4.8 billion ha, so there is still some 2.7 billion ha in reserve.”