Lots of hot air

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You seem to be confusing needs and wants. You need something (fuel, for eg) to achieve a want ( a holiday, for eg). Obviously, if you want to be slack in the use of the terms you can call most people's summer hols a need, but that's a pretty flabby definition of a need in the context of this thread. Your list is far from making planesleuth's thoughts look silly, quite the opposite.

Everything except 2-3k calories a day and a few litres of water are wants, we don't "need" anything else.
 
we do - shelter clothing and heat. We are not designed to live up here without assistance
 
we do - shelter clothing and heat. We are not designed to live up here without assistance

Yes because you are living in an area that we can only colonise because of our technological advancement. If we go back to living on the plains of Africa we wouldn't need the shelter and heat, of course many of us would die, only the tough would survive.
 
yay, mind you bee there done that and it isn't as easy as you would think
 
yay, mind you bee there done that and it isn't as easy as you would think

Oh no, surviving on what we "need" isn't easy, that's why it is calling surviving. But these people are talking about what is essential and just being silly really, they say we are using more than we "need" that we don't "need" to go on holiday etc, they are doing this sat in a nice warm home, dry, comfortable, clothed, well fed and on an electronic device maybe even sat in a well tooled workshop. They don't "need" any of these things, they "want" them, but they don't want others to enjoy themselves like they do.
 
Truth leaking out: "Rich people, in every country, are overwhelmingly more responsible for global heating than the poor, with SUVs and meat-eating singled out for blame, while the high-carbon basis for future economic growth comes under question" Greenhouse gas emissions must peak within 4 years, says leaked UN report
Does this mean that all our wealth MUST be confiscated, for the good of the planet? I think the term is "watermellon": green on the outside, but red on the inside.
 
Man has always been top of the food chain

Sorry, not so. Life started long before man came on the scene and the animals that evolved into man were prey to other more evolved creatures. We gradually overtook them and now have an unassailable lead - which, I agree, we are misusing hugely.
 
Questions have been asked and the debate has been open for 2000 years Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans: Ecology in the Ancient Mediterranean (Ancient Society and History) (Review)
It got a big boost 1962 with Rachel Carson Silent Spring - Wikipedia
Then 1972 with the Ecologist A Blueprint for Survival - Wikipedia
The CO2 greenhouse effect has been known since 1859 Meet the woman who first identified the greenhouse effect
The just released IPCC report Sixth Assessment Report could be seen as the culmination of all this, coming at the end of the process as world-wide change arrives, loud, strong and impossible to ignore.
Are these articles you've actually read or did you google the subject and cut and paste the list of returned documents?
 
Are these articles you've actually read or did you google the subject and cut and paste the list of returned documents?
Of course I read them, except the last one of course, which is huge and can only be flipped through at first. Easier to pick up on the commentaries first.
I knew about the Romans and environment but that was a new read. The gist of early ecology is well known Ancient civilizations were already messing up the planet
I read Rachel Carson when it came out I was still at school. Still got the same copy from nearly 60 years ago!
I read The Ecologist Blueprint when it came out I had a sub to the Ecologist at the time and I have a copy still in a box somewhere. I was into ecology at the time and read Konrad Lorenz and others. Darwin, Richard Dawkins, etc etc
I knew about John Tyndall but not about Eunice Foot, so that was a new read
I've been reading this sort of stuff on and off all my life. Scientific American, New Scientist etc
Just spotted my copy of "The Old Red Sandstone, or, New Walks in an Old Field" by Miller 1841 that's a little gem!
PS every time I google something interesting turns up - I 'd never heard of Tim Watkins before last week Seeing the harness but not the horse
 
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Have you never watched Brian Cox's 'The Planets' on tv? This planet was NOT created by some unseen hand - it evolved........ and the sooner it can be proved beyond any doubt the better.
It can never be proved unless the unseen hand chooses to pop in and admit or deny it. He (She ) might say "no that's not one of mine"!
 
Two stages, pre steam engine and mankind had undertaken a large amount of forrest clearance for farming and then post steam engine where we began digging for coal, followed by oil. First lot could plead ignorance but by the end of the victorian period someone must have been thinking about the enviroment but just like now it may have come up in conversation but no action.
 

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