Saturday, October 27, 2007

Boulimic

"Some people live lightly on the land: Bedouin clans roam the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa; small groups of indigenous people follow reindeer herds across frigid Arctic terrain; and tribes of hunter-gatherers forage the plains of southern Africa and the forests of Amazonia and Papua New Guinea.

Overall, nearly one-quarter of Earth's land-based biological productivity ends up in people's hands and bellies, Erb and his colleagues estimate. Other research suggests that people appropriate a comparable, but slightly smaller, share of the ocean's productivity—defined as the mass of photosynthetic organisms at the base of the sea's food chain."

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