Garret Hardin - Living within Limits

The essential life of an educated urban dweller, from birth to death, is lived out on ghost acreage*. Urbanites, lamentably unconscious of this support base most of the time, live a life of illusion. This does not make for ecologically realistic thinking; illiterate farmers of the poorest countries are often closer to political realities than are the most sophisticated city dwellers. Unfortunately urbanites, in most countries and in most times, control both the media and the political system.

 

Taken from the late American ecologist (1915 – 2003) Garret Hardins’ 1993 book Living within Limits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Hardin

 

 

*’Ghost Acreage’ is a term coined by the agricultural geographer Georg Borgstrom in 1965 for the area of land required to provide sufficient resources for a person to survive in their present way of life. http://www.thefoodsection.com/foodsection/2009/05/ghost-acres.html