Maxed out

Humans living far beyond planet's means: WWF

BEIJING (Reuters) - Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday.

Populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003 largely because of human threats such as pollution, clearing of forests and overfishing, the group also said in a two-yearly report.

"For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report....

Insert hackneyed Mastercard joke here ---> .

This is exactly why we need environmental enforcement by the federal government and not simply rules and regulations of the self-monitoring type. Normally I'm a laissez-faire kinda panda (or perhaps simply just lay-zee) but I have come to the sad realization that when we humans think nobody's watching, we do bad things. I once thought that if we all recognized the same problem we'd be good at self-governance but I'm no longer quite so naive.

Unless some biotech firm out there is working on cloning the whole Earth, in which case I'll take two.