Perhaps people do not realise how little environmental
space we all share because there is a rather strange belief around which often comes out in anti-Green propaganda articles, particularly in relation to global warming, where the protagonists try to lead us to believe that we cannot possibly affect the environment of Earth because we’re so puny and the earth is so large. These people must be mathematically illiterate.

In the late 1960’s people raised concerns about the growing population and scoffers at the time claimed that the entire world’s population could squeeze onto the Isle of Wight (although this assumes just over one square foot each!), thus making the world back then appear a pretty roomy place. I did the complementary calculation and discovered that if the global population then (3.6 billion) was evenly distributed over of the land surface of earth, then each person would only have an area of land 220 yards square as their personal environmental space! Looked at this way, things looked rather cramped.

Fast forward to today. Divide the land surface of Earth by the current population. It works out that the “share” of Earth’s surface each human has is a square of land about 145 metres (165 yards) on a side. Within this patch we have to cast our personal environmental shadow; use energy; manufacture our goods; dispose of our personal waste; farm our share of animals; grow our own food crops; extract minerals for our purchases; have an area for water storage; dissipate our personal waste, pollution and cumulative
pesticides not to mention room for the multitude of wildlife and plants that generate our oxygen etc and form the ecological web of life without which we could not survive.

Extending the idea, each person’s environmental “spaceship” in 2010 can also be seen as a globe about 1km in diameter within which we have a patch of “Planet Earth” about 270 meters square, 70% of which is ocean, leaving the
aforementioned patch of land 145 metres square to live on. I think that shows that Earth is pretty cramped and it is beyond rational belief that our activities are not affecting things.

It also show how much “lebensraum” (don’t invoke Godwin’s law here…) we have lost since the 60′s.

It would take the world’s top sprinter about 13.9 seconds to run from one side of their square to the other and less than a minute to run around the perimeter (if they could keep up the pace…)