Ecological Footprint Essay

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In 1992, William Rees developed the ecological footprint concept. The ecological footprint and its close analog the water footprint has become a popular way of accounting for the level of impact that human society is imparting on the Earth's ecosystems.[76][77] All indications are that the human enterprise is unsustainable as the footprint of society is placing too much stress on the ecology of the planet.[78] The WWF 2008 living planet report and other researchers report that human civilization has exceeded the bio-regenerative capacity of the planet.[78][79] This means that the footprint of human consumption is extracting more natural resources than can be replenished by ecosystems around the world. The current resource-intensive lifestyle of people in the developed world is not sustainable, but the toll on the environment from poverty and rapid population growth is not sustainable either Environmental sociology is the study of human interactions with the natural environment, typically emphasizing human dimensions of environmental problems, social impacts of those problems, and efforts to resolve them. As with other subfields of sociology, scholarship in environmental sociology may be at one or multiple levels of analysis, from global (e.g. world-systems) to local, societal to individual. Attention is paid also to the processes by which environmental problems become defined and known to humans. As argued by notable environmental sociologist John Bellamy Foster, the predecessor to modern environmental sociology is Marx's analysis of the metabolic rift, which influenced contemporary thought on sustainability. Environmental sociology is often interdisciplinary and overlaps with the sociology of risk, rural sociology and the sociology of disaster. While we are used to thinking of cities as geographically discrete places, most of the land "occupied" by their
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