The weight of humanity presses down on the Earth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers - little we see in Nature that is ours.

It’s hard to believe that William Wordsworth wrote these profoundly prescient lines in 1806! As we arrive into 2025, quarter way through the 21st century, in ‘getting and spending’ we have certainly raised the standard of human living and comfort, but profoundly transformed the world in the process.

Humans – all 8.2 billion of us – make up only 0.01% of the weight of life on earth, which is in turn only a billionth of a percent of the total weight of the earth. But we have already had an outsize impact on the earth’s biology. In 1806, there were 1 billion people alive (give or take a few million). Now, it’s a little more than 8.25 billion – an eight-fold increase in human beings. Our footprint on the world has grown by much more than eight-fold during the same time.

In 1900, the weight of human-made objects was just 3% of living biomass. Scientists now estimate that the weight of the entire technosphere – all human-made artefacts and objects, from large skyscrapers to tiny plastic beads – weighs 1.1 trillion tonnes, as much as the weight of all living things. (Of this, about one-third comes from residential buildings, and one-third from our transportation systems – roads, railways, cars, ships, aircraft, pipelines and the like.)

Plants, which used to weigh about two teratonnes at the start of the first agricultural revolution, about 10,000 BCE, are only about half that weight now. What we gained in the expansion of cultivated crops has been lost many times over when we cut down forests. Wild birds and mammals have similarly shrunk in numbers and weight, more than compensated for by the increase in farmed animals – including 65.8 billion chicken, 1.5 billion pigs and 0.3 billion cattle in 2016 alone.

It’s difficult to grasp what this continuous churn of material production means to the earth at a global scale, so let’s look at what it’s doing in one specific location. New York City contains more than 8 million people, who live, work, eat and play in 1,084,954 buildings that weigh about 764,000 tonnes – yet the clay and sandy ground that some of the city is built on is sinking under the weight of buildings. The city sinks as sea levels rise, combining risks of flooding for the millions who live in the world’s richest city.

The weight of humanity presses down on the world in less obvious ways too. Climate change has also redistributed the weight of water in the oceans, from the poles to the equator. Satellite image analysis shows that Greenland has lost 270 billion metric tons of ice between 2002-2023. The ice has melted into water, flowing from the north pole down to the equator and redistributing of the earth’s water mass. Because the north pole is lighter than it used to, and the equator much heavier - the speed of the Earth’s rotation has slowed, leading to a problem for time keepers, who may have to set the clock back by one second in 2028 to compensate.

In an interview with CNN, Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the University of California at San Diego and lead author on this research, said - “Being able to say so much ice has melted that it’s actually changed the rotation of the Earth by a measurable amount, I think gives you the sense, OK, this is a big deal.”

It is a big deal. We have only one Earth, and we can’t give up on it. Not for ourselves, nor our children and grandchildren, nor the birds, butterflies, tigers, rhinos, ants, spiders and other magnificent beings that call this planet, our common planet, home. So here’s a good story, one that brings some hope as we move into 2026.

Choora – a wonderful short film on the “heart and soul” of island living and sustainable fishing in Lakshwadeep, by Nature Conservation Foundation’s Oceans and Coasts Programme – part of their innovative, long term work on place-based, community-embedded conservation in these stunning, low-footprint, coral-rich lagoons and reefs. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

This article is also published on the author's blog. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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