3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
space. The health and wellbeing of humanity and the sustainability of the global economy are
intimately dependent upon the biosphere. There are a myriad of complex social-ecological
linkages ceaselessly occurring, embedded within and throughout the world’s Biosphere Valleys.
Regional and national Biosphere Valleys, integrating rewilded nature corridors into the socioecological
fabric enhance important long-term qualities such as resilience, adaptability, vitality,
anti-fragility, and vigor. These qualities hold current citizens in good stead, while also acting on
our moral responsibility to maintain a healthy planetary biosphere for the many generations to
come.
The Third Industrial Revolution is poised to trigger exponential growth in world economic
productivity, while at the same time greatly diminishing the immense biosphere impacts caused
by First and Second Industrial Revolution technologies. Rewilding of biosphere valleys provides
the assurance and insurance that these social-ecological processes will sustain and maintain
flourishing life on earth far into the future.
Civilizations over the ages largely ignored maintaining the integrity of the biosphere, often to
their peril. Archeological research has uncovered repeated collapses of earlier societies,
invariably due to overusing and severely degrading their biosphere endowment. 309,310 Earth
satellite imagery reveals Humans Appropriate nearly 40 percent of the global terrestrial plant
Net Primary Production (HANPP); and more recent satellite mapping indicates “75% of the
planet’s land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures.” 311 Expropriation of the
land surface Net Primary Production, along with the soaring rates of marine and freshwater
aquatic species die-off from overfishing the oceans, has driven up the current rate of species
extinction to 1000 times faster than the natural background rate. With human population and
resource consumption continuing to expand, it is estimated that the remaining “available”
terrestrial NPP amounts to only 10 percent (when unproductive and remote lands, plus
underground NPP like roots, are removed from the total). 312
There are further risks to biodiversity and natural habitat loss as the global economy phases out
fossil fuels. The historical consumption of Net Primary Production (NPP) for satisfying energy
demands was replaced in the first and second industrial revolutions by mining underground
309 Tainter, Joseph (1990) The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press.
310 Butzer, Karl W. (2012) Collapse, environment, and society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA, PNAS, March 6, 2012, vol. 109, no. 10, http://www.pnas.org/content/109/10/3632.full.
311 Venter, Oscar, Eric W. Sanderson, Ainhoa Magrach et al. (2016) Sixteen years of change in the global terrestrial
human footprint and implications for biodiversity conservation, Nature Communications, August 23, 2016,
7:12558, http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12558.
312 Running, Steven W. (2012) A Measurable Planetary Boundary for the Biosphere, Science 337:1458; DOI:
10.1126/science.1227620
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