The Weight of the World
Title montage from 1973 ‘eco-horror’ Soylent Green - a century’s increase in the mass of humanity.
A startling piece in New Scientist reports that in 2020 humanity’s creations outweighed the biosphere for the first time. The article (link here) describes the literally massive increase in man-made stuff in the past century.
In 1900, the mass of non-natural objects was only 3% the mass of all living things. Now, man-made material is on track to be triple the weight of biomass by 2040. Critically for Architects and Developers, most of the manufactured mass is in infrastructure - buildings and roads, while trees and shrubs make up 90% of living mass.
As an example, “there are 1100 gigatonnes of buildings and 8 gigatonnes of plastic on the planet, compared with 900 gigatonnes of trees and 4 gigatonnes of animals.” The mass of plastic is double that of animals! While we may take comfort that total biomass has stayed constant for the last 120 years, this is countered by the increase in artificial objects which have doubled in weight every 20 years.
As creators of the built environment, we have a responsibility to temper this growth. Sure, we could plant more trees to re-jig the ratio (and absorb C02 (or maybe not, link here)) but a more active approach may be required. Renovating rather than building anew, right-sizing spaces, designing adaptable places that serve multiple functions over daily and annual cycles and ensuring that we displace as little of the natural environment as possible in our developments.
We can start at the urban scale, loosening our attachment to single-family housing and bitumen-hungry cars and favouring denser settlements amenable to mass-transit. Innovation in building materials and technology may allow us to go beyond recycling to construct from living or at worst formerly-living things with minimal transformation (cork, clay, hay or kelp). Reconsidering comfort, welcoming rain on our faces and mud underfoot, would reintegrate our being with nature by being in nature. Human ingenuity got us to this point; now it must be deployed to save us from ourselves.
