Human beings comprise about 0.5 per cent by weight of the animals on the planet. Yet they beg, borrow and steal for themselves roughly 23 per cent of the entire primary production of land plants (the number is much lower if the oceans are included). This number is known to ecologists as the HANPP – the ‘human appropriation of net primary productivity’. That is to say, of the 650 billion tonnes of carbon potentially absorbed from the air by land plants each year, eighty are harvested, ten are burnt and sixty are prevented from growing by ploughs, streets and goats, leaving 500 to support all
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