You need some sort of denser organization, to conserve the land outside of the cities and also reduce energy use inside cities. But if we're talking about how a million people are organizing, you can't have everyone living on a single plot of a land with a yard and a tree. It's easy to look at cities and think, well, that's a real scar on the natural landscape. Why are cities, which are the source of many environmental problems, our future? Though we don't see cities as natural, part of my reasoning behind putting 'metro' into our species name is to get us to think about how humans have been living in settlements of some kind for a long time now, and maybe that is part of what's natural for us. Homo sapiens, the way that we're doing it right now, probably won't survive. We're only going to do that if we become Metro sapiens. But the reason I use that term is that it embraces this idea that to make it on this planet we're going to have to adopt urbanism to help us minimize our environmental impact on the planet. Vargo spoke with about this audacious proposal and what it means for our future on Earth:Īre city dwellers-Metro sapiens-fundamentally different from people living in the country? To live sustainably, people need to embrace their inner urbanites-and recognize our species not as Homo sapiens, but 'Metro sapiens'. Vargo, a public health scientist and urban planner at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Global Health Institute, argues that humans, at least in current population numbers, can no longer survive in solely rural lifestyles. 'Cities are very much the dominant habitat of our species,' writes Jason Vargo in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. Now more than half the world's population can be found in urban areas. But only over the last several centuries have humans moved into cities en masse. The study was published in the journal Humanimalia.Cities have been around for thousands of years, since the first were settled in Mesopotamia between 40 B.C. “Nowadays people mostly use it to avoid going through complex permit applications and legal issues with studies on human subjects,” he said. “To prove such a theory, you don’t need a large sample size you need just one well-documented case,” he said of the unconventional method. But this doesn’t mean that we have to be real predators instead, we can follow these instincts in more intelligent ways,” he said.ĭinets noted that conducting studies on oneself has been important in the history of science, most famously with infectious disease research. “The take-home message of the study is that we have predatory instincts and have to be aware of them. “The recent explosive popularity of the Pokemon Go game, which allows players to hunt for virtual animals across a real terrain, shows how addictive such proxies can be and how many people can enjoy hunting-like behaviour despite being city dwellers completely isolated from natural environments,” Dinets said. Dinets said that his father, a chemist, too had a lifelong hobby of chasing, catching and studying rare butterflies. He traced his interest in wild animals or the natural world back to the age of three. To probe this question, Dinets looked to his own childhood. Dinets noted that conducting studies on oneself has been important in the history of science, most famously with infectious disease research. “It is possible that we all have the hunting instinct, but it has never been proven,” Dinets said. Dinets used himself as a case study to demonstrate that at least some humans do have a hunting instinct - or, more precisely, an innate interest in finding and catching prey. Vladimir Dinets, from University of Tennessee in the US wanted to find out if we have an inherited hunting instinct, like dogs, cats and other predators. Hunting has played a major role in human history, helping humans survive and populate the world. Running daily for four months can give you super memory

Virtual city dwellers crossword