Most urgent environmental threat facing mankind

[Smarty]

A post in the global warming thread make me think of this. What do you think is the most important environmental threat facing mankind ?

[wjfox]

In the short term I would say peak oil. We face a potential global war over this.

Medium term (20-40 years) - mass extinctions, loss of natural habitats.

Longer term - climate change. Rising sea levels could affect 10% of the world's population.

[Nightjar]

It's very difficult to vote Smarty because they're all pretty much interconnected symptoms of each other.

[Medo]

I would vote for overpopulation if it was an option. It's directly responsible for causing most of those options in the poll.

[Tony Sebo]

Good thread.

I voted for the pollution one, though nightjar is right, they are all largely interconnected to some extent.

[VaastuShastra]

Farming vote here.

Feeding 9bn humans this century, starvation, the price of food, and the destruction of forest for farmland.

Most of those listed are almost equal in importance.

[Nightjar]

Originally Posted by Medo

I would vote for overpopulation if it was an option. It's directly responsible for causing most of those options in the poll.

True.

I feel silly voting for global warming now - I got all confused and voted for the symptom not the cause.

[larven]

All of the above.

They just demonstrate that humans are vermin and the worst thing to happen to this planet since its conception billions of years ago. A huge asteroid strike that destroyed the human race would be best for the earth in the long run.

No doubt we'll be attempting to colonize Mars in the next century or so, rape it for its resources and end up fucking it up just as badly as the earth.

[Smarty]

Originally Posted by larven

They just demonstrate that humans are vermin and the worst thing to happen to this planet since its conception billions of years ago.

I tend to agree.

Have you read James Lovelock's books about Gaia, where he theorises that the earth functions almost as a single entity in perfect balance ? It could be that by upsetting that balance, we've already sown the seeds of our own eventual destruction.

[gothicform]

i suspect humans may be rather hard for the earth to get rid of. even if we managed to nuke the place in an all out war there would still be surviving pockets of people. civilisation however is rather more dependent on us having benign conditions or else we could end up like somalia.

[poshbakerloo]

Climate change I guess, although the damage has pretty much already been done...