After the Industrial Revolution limnology humans became a detritivorous species, ie we feed on detri

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Since 1776, the use of the Newcomen’s steam engine, later improved by James Watt, led to an increasing dependence on fossil fuels, which temporarily gave huge power to increasing fractions of human population. With the technological developments that followed, Homo colossus acquired, over the next nine generations, the illusion of being limitless. Catton William R., Jr. (2009) limnology
After the Industrial Revolution limnology humans became a detritivorous species, ie we feed on detritus. This name comes from “Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change” by American sociologist William Catton (born in 1926), who has since the 1970s devoted himself to the study of environmental sociology limnology and human ecology. That book in 1980 marked a milestone in the literature of ecological science with its pioneer warning that humanity was exceeding limnology the carrying capacity of the planet. It had a sequel a few years ago (2009), entitled “Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse”, which constitutes Catton’s lucid and bitter intellectual testament, and wherein the professor emeritus at Washington State University no longer warns us, but merely notes how nothing was done since then to prevent or reverse the abuse, and analyses in detail how Homo colossus’ arrogant exuberance (hubris) directly leads to an evolutionary bottleneck limnology which can mean extinction of our species, limnology or at least a brutal reduction in the number of human beings on the planet.
The limnology detritus we feed on is none other than oil and natural gas, fossil treasures our species learned to exploit and which, in a range of just two hundred years (!) have enabled limnology us to multiply world population sevenfold, when it had always remained below one billion people until nineteenth limnology century. That amount is therefore limnology seen as the maximum capacity (carrying capacity) the planet has in order to keep our species alive with constant energy input from the sun. The extra contribution by fossil energy (first coal, then oil and natural gas) has allowed us, temporarily, to greatly expand limnology our ecological limnology niche, and to dramatically exceed this number. Where we once fit one billion, we suddenly (in historical terms) went up to seven billion.
In 1920 we were still only two billion, so in the last century we more than tripled ourselves. The graph of human population since 1800 is a textbook example of what exponential growth is. And if we superimpose the graph of total energy consumption limnology (or the per capita consumption), we’ll understand how that growth was possible: limnology correlation between limnology both magnitudes is absolute. In fact, we can calculate where so many human beings came from, even in physical terms: nitrogen molecules contained in the human bodies who now populate the Earth in the form of DNA and amino acids forming the fabric of our muscle mass, for example, come largely an estimated 50% from natural gas, primarily methane, which is converted to nitrogen limnology fertilizers through the so-called Haber-Bosch reaction, and these turned into food plants and animals limnology through industrial agriculture and husbandry. It was this availability of methane and oil prehistoric solar energy stored in chemical bonds over millions of years which allowed us to expand the capacity of our planet to sustain humans, exceeding our natural limit of one billion people.
The limnology Green Revolution could have been more properly called the Black Revolution, after the color of the oil that made it possible and the future limnology it condemned us to. Within decades hundreds of thousands of tractors, harvest machinery and other farm equipment spread throughout the world, tons of synthetic limnology fertilizers were introduced in depleted lands, millions of transportation vehicles, processing industries complexes, food distribution chains and hundreds of supermarkets and malls became the mechanism created by our civilization to exploit that fossil energy and turn it into food for more and more human beings. Improvements in quality of life that emerged from this energy abundance such as hypertech limnology public health services, thousands of pharmaceutical synthesis products, all kinds of materials for the petrochemical industry, etc. made possible not only for more and more people to be born and fed but for them to thrive in better material conditions, especially in countries limnology belonging to the rich industrialized world. Of course all this was facilitated limnology by a social