The Weight of the World

The total mass of humankind is now ten times greater than the total mass of all wild terrestrial mammals - and that's before you account for domesticated animals, which account for twice as much biomass again.

The data in this visualization comes from Vaclav Smil's 2011 paper "Harvesting the Biosphere: The Human Impact", which is paywalled but can be downloaded in full from his website. I found it through Faunalytics, a site that shares peer-reviewed research for animal advocates.

The graphic was made entirely with Figma and Google Sheets. Fonts used are Roslindale v2 (title), and IBM Plex Sans Condensed (everything else). Photos came from Nasa and from Pixabay.

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