The 1200km Shahe Aqueduct in China - from the BBC website

Readers of this blog may be interested in the BBC’s Supersized Earth which you can watch on iPlayer.

The three episodes explore a few aspects of how humanity has being “redesigning” planet Earth to build the modern world.

The parallels with the philosophy behind aspects of the CESER research programme and the wider Earth Systems Engineering philosophy are extremely clear.  Although there is some amazing cinematography and the presenter covers some interesting ground I couldn’t help feeling it was a rather one sided take on the sustainability challenge – look how we’ve turned the desert into farms etc. and almost no consideration of the implications of waste, resource use, chemicals required and so on.  As anyone familiar with our research programme will know these issues are of course highly complex – but if we do not seek to communicate, understand and address them a truly sustainable future seems unlikely, regardless of our technological feats.

But please make your own mind up…