Stuff Outweighs Life

Thanks to humans, the weight of everything we’ve made outweighs all life. Life, which has been active for billions of years, makes life; but when that life is over, that material eventually becomes new life. Things, stuff that humans make, usually is abandoned, dumped, or buried. Too little is recycled. New stuff comes from new material harvested from the planet. It as inevitable that our stuff would eventually weigh more. That fact that it has already reached that level so soon may be the surprise. Even if we were to only build from recycled materials, our stuff would continue to outweigh life. Currently both weigh about 1.2 trillion tonnes. The human products increased 100% in the last 20 years, and there’s no reason to expect the increase to stop for years or decades. Extinctions have been caused by humans crowding out species. Now we outweigh them, too.