Category: Ecology

Deflating the Food Bubble

October 15, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

The era of world food security is coming to an end simply because we can’t sustain the way food is produced. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Research Centre in Washington, says the demands for food are growing so fast that unless we deflate the…

Counterfactual History

September 22, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

If we consider contemporary human size as just one possible outcome of different evolutionary possibilities then perhaps it becomes easier to envision a different, short-sized, future. What if human evolution had developed differently? Counterfactual history tries to answer what-if questions. It explores history by means…

Abundance Fantasies: Corn Cult

July 27, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

Mexican protesters against the high tortilla prices in 2007 rallied around an oversized corn. Their public display of the desire for an abundant food supply ressembles cargo cults in which the visualisation of desired abundance, or the context in which the abundance is believed to exist, is…

Global Human Biomass

June 22, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

A new REPORT published on BioMed Central rightfully warns us of the need to consider the ecological effects of increasing human weight. Obese and overweight people globally consume an extra amount of food that could feed 300 million people. From data collected in 2005 researchers calculated the…

Six Cities / Empty World

June 20, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Earth is turning into a global city. Over half the world’s population lives in urbanised areas and those cities are taking up more and more space.  Most of the rest of the world is organised to supply food and resources. Even so, cities are the most…

Tiny House Movement

April 15, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Fish kept in small tanks remain small because they produce pheromones that suppress growth. If the same rule applies to people, the small house movement may proof to be a powerful tool to curb our physical growth. The small house movement is an intriguing architectural and social movement…

Parental Height Minus 10

March 14, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

In an exiting paper by S. Matthew Liao,  Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache, it is argued that human engineering may well be a reasonable tool to achieve a sustainable relationship between the planet and its human population. One of their more intriging suggestions is the possibility…

Benito’s Rodents

February 20, 2012 By arne hendriks Off

During the Second World War Mussolini’s government urged Italians to keep guinea pigs to supplement their meager meat rations. Rodents are the world’s most widespread, adaptable, and prolific group of mammals. They reproduce well, grow fast, and can adapt to a wide variety of local…

Poultry/House

February 11, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

If we decide to shrink the human species our livestock may need to shrink with us. We’ll only consume about 2 to 10% of the food we consume today. The meat of one chicken could easily feed 100 people and one egg alone would be enough to…

Krill Adaptations

January 28, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Because environments vary with both predictable patterns and with unpredictable but recurring events, ecologists have long been interested in the ecological adaptations that organisms use to survive periods in which the environment may be exceptionally harsh. One of the most interesting adaptations observed in the…

Hhp (Human Height Print)

December 5, 2011 By arne hendriks 2

Tall people need more resources than short people. That’s why it’s rather alarming that the human species continues to grow taller. In fact our increasing height puts more pressure on the ecosystem services than the total population growth. If people become 20% taller this creates over…

40 Whales

January 15, 2011 By arne hendriks Off

Creating a more sustainable lifestyle is an important argument why shrinking could be a good idea. At the same time the very real possibility of widespread megalophobia as a result of smaller size may lead to unsuspected urges to compensate. People will always find ways…

Aquarium Fish & Bonsai Birds

January 10, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

For the Disproportionate Restaurant we will investigate a different range of ingredients. During Transnatural several chefs will create a map of small ingredients and prepare a menu for The Incredible shrinking Man. Both will be offered for tasting. It’s likely that we’ll see a new…

7 Billion

January 1, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

In 2011 the world population will reach 7 billion.  To put this into perspective; around 8000 BC at the dawn of agriculture, the Earth’s population was only 5 million. At the beginning of our calendar (0 AD) this had increased to around 200 million. During the Industrial…

Killer Hail

November 16, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Some things just won’t shrink. Like the weather. Rain drops, snow flakes and hail stones will not change with us. If we decide to shink to 50 centimeters, talking about the weather becomes more than the casual social exchange around the coffee machine. With hail…

Megalophobia

October 15, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Quite often the  primary response to The Incredible Shrinking Man’s ambition to downsize the human body is the fear of being exposed to animals. As we’ll shrink, our environment and everything in it will appear a lot larger. The fear of large animals and objects…

The Shrinking Iguana

September 20, 2010 By arne hendriks 4

Much to his surprise, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University has found that in times of famine, marine iguanas in the Galápagos Islands shrink in length and then regrow when food is plentiful again. “For vertebrates, it’s sort of a dogma that they don’t shrink,”…

Degrowth: Small is Happy

September 15, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

In the influential collection of essays “Small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered” first published in 1973, the economic thinker Fritz Schumacher proposes the idea of “smallness within bigness”. For a large organization to work it must behave like a related…

Plant-stress and Size

May 4, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

As with animals, Plants can be dwarfed through genetic engineering and selective breeding, but environmental stresses  such as soil quality, light, drought, flood, cold, infection, and herbivory, can also lead to a dwarfed stature . However the majority of dwarfing in plants does not directly occur…

The Truth About Your Height

May 1, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

Thomas T. Samaras could be considered the godfather of shrink-thinking. The Incredible Shrinking Man just aquired his 1994 book, The Truth About Your Height. Exploring the Myths and Realities of Human Size and Its Effects on Performance, health, Pollution, and Survival. It states:  “Short people…