Look at a breakpoint, daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth,

but the Colson Center on John Stone Street.

Recently, scientists at the Israeli Wisement Institute of Science calculated the total

biomass of three different categories of living things. Humans domesticated mammals like

cows and pigs and wild mammals, like whales, dolphins and deer. Researchers estimated the combined

weight of every single wild mammal to be about 60 million metric tons, the combined biomass of

every human being to be about 390 million metric tons, and the combined biomass of the mammals

we've domesticated to be a whopping 630 million metric tons. In other words, as researchers concluded,

only about 6% of the combined weight of mammals on Earth can still be considered wild. And yet,

at the same time, we've never had more films available to us about unspoiled nature.

Beginning with BBC's Fantastic 2006 mini-series Planet Earth, an entire subgenre has emerged

celebrating the pristine beauty of a natural world, utilizing high-grade cameras,

aerial footage and powerful cinematic scores. The results have been incredible. In the words of

one commentator, we're the first people in human history to be able to get close enough to

African lions to see the taste buds on their tongue while still being tucked in our beds.

At the same time, in the world of ecology, getting closer to nature has brought us no closer to

having an answer to that perennial question, where do humans belong in the natural world?

Now, how we answer that question depends on our assumptions about both ecology and anthropology.

Weissman Professor Ron Milo put it this way, the more we're exposed to nature's full

splendor be it through films, museums or ecotourism, the more we might be tempted to imagine that nature

is an endless and inexhaustible resource. In reality, the weight of all remaining wildland mammals

is less than 10% of humanity's combined weight, which amounts to only about 6 pounds of wildland

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