Talking trash. No, it is not about university faculty :)

This map from the Economist is three days late as far as I am concerned; I could have made wonderful use of it in my intro class on Monday!

In the US, we are one heck of a consuming population that generates so much trash!

Meanwhile, this report (ht) argues that we are getting ever so close to an ecological tipping point:

In a paper published in today's edition of the journal Nature, 22 researchers from a variety of fields liken the human impact to global events eons ago that caused mass extinctions, permanently altering Earth's biosphere.
"Humans are now forcing another such transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience," wrote the authors, who are from the U.S., Europe, Canada and South America.
If current trends continue — exploding global population, rapidly rising temperatures and the clearance of more than 40% of Earth's surface for urban development or agriculture — the planet could reach a tipping point, they say.
"The net effects of what we're causing could actually be equivalent to an asteroid striking the Earth in a worst-case scenario," the paper's lead author, Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, said in an interview. "I don't want to sound like Armageddon. I think the point to be made is that if we just ignore all the warning signs of how we're changing the Earth, the scenario of losses of biodiversity — 75% or more — is not an outlandish scenario at all."
Global population just passed 7 billion and is expected to reach 9.3 billion or more by 2050. "By the year 2070, we'll live in a hotter world than it's been since humans evolved as a species," Barnosky said.

 Party like it is 2025!