Actually you're incorrect once again. Our poop DOES get recycled in the whole scheme of things. This is Earth.. EVERYTHING gets recycled (except for what we send out into space). No we might not be eating our own poop but our poop DOES work its way back into the environment where it feeds some bacteria.. which then feed some plants.. which then feed some animals.. when then feed us. It's all part of the circle of life, or were you deprived of Disney movies as a kid?
It just kills me how people actually believe that what we don't reuse gets wasted. That just isn't true in the whole scheme of things. I'm not against recycling but when it costs more to recycle than to just produce new then one has to wonder if there is any real benefit to it...
Your notion of our waste being recycled into terrestrial ecosystems is sadly mistaken. We don't bring our wastes back into the fields, but rather spill them out into the ocean. Unless we start eating algae, doing that won't help agriculture.
As for your bizzare question, no, I wasn't deprived of Disney movies. Rather, I did not care for them, and my dad read me the works of Isaac Asimov, George Lucas, and Tolkien instead. Best trade-off ever, I learned at least ten to fifteen words each night because when I didn't know a word, we'd look it up. One advantage is that I've never had to study for a single vocabulary quiz.
you need to stick with your toy soldiers or whatever it is that you do, science is not your forte. do i have to point out that the biosphere you live in has been around since long before humans? without human interference/destruction, the biosphere is a self sustaining system...everything living organism contributes to the next generation, from birth to death. every organism produces waste and that waste is recycled in some manner naturally, not with human science. it's very obvious with your wikipedia knowledge that you neglected the idea of fertilizer...look up milorganite so you can get a basic understanding of how poop should be recycled.
you want to solve world hunger, figure out how to economically turn desert into fertile land...don't try to sell fertilizer as food.
just so you don't miss it with your less than stellar reading, this is a description of milorganite.
Let's keep personal attacks out of this.
You are correct in stating that given constant sunshine and heat from the earth, the biosphere is self-sustaining. However, you conveniently neglected to mention what happens when six-and-a-half billion people all try to get fed. First off, you've got soil erosion from overtilling, acid rain from processing, and desertification from irrigation. However, there is another important aspect. When we eat food, we're indirectly taking nutrients from the soil, and putting them through our bodies. However, we don't complete the "circle of life" in that we just dump most of it out to sea in the form of sewage. This leads me to my next point.
So we're just dumping nutrients from the soil into the sea, and they don't return quickly enough if at all. What this means is that we're depleting our terrestrial stores of nutrients, while adding more to the ocean. This doesn't help the ocean, either, especially in the case of nitrogen runoff, which creates huge algal blooms that result in dead zones. Dead zones are massive swaths of de-oxygenated ocean, where higher lifeforms cannot be sustained. We've created an imbalance, and ignoring it will not make it go away.
-Penguin
