Try to suspend your disbelief long enough to get an idea of the environmentalist world view. I must warn you that the picture is not pretty. If you are not aware of these issues, this may be disturbing.
Start with the premise that the world is finite. The earth is a bounded sphere. The biosphere is smaller than you might think. The crust, the ocean and the atmosphere are a small portion of the earth. 90% of life is in margins of the land where it’s not too dry, too hot or too cold, in the shallow and upper portions of the ocean, in the lower portions of the atmosphere. The atmosphere you can breathe is only a few miles thick; the entire troposphere no more than 10 miles. You can see farther than the atmosphere is thick on a clear day. Think about it, the biosphere doesn’t reach up and down endlessly. In the words of the shuttle astronauts, when you see it from space, the biosphere is a thin gossamer veneer wrapped around the planet.
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