Divergence,

Yes, I've just been looking up the 86 percent figure - and it seems the information is from 1998...so the situation may have altered, although how much is probably debatable... also statistics are notorious for their nebulous meaning.

Anyway, it's from the UN Human Development Report(1998) - a study on "Consumption for Human Development".
(couldn't download the report, but it's quoted here):
http://globalissues.org/article/214/stress-on-the-environment-society-and-resources

and here: (item 20)

http://www.stwr.org/poverty-inequality/key-facts.html

"Regarding the saving of the World with the Haber-Bosch process and the Green Revolution, I would ask have you heard of Jevons Paradox?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
And if maybe these efforts have not made the problems worse?"

Did a little research on Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution.

Apparently he only ever intended it to buy us time to tame what he referred to as the 'population dragon' in the third world.

However clearly no one took his concern about over population seriously and the green revolution has indeed made matters far worse.

Instead of taming the population dragon, global leaders ignored the problem as the global population trippled from 2 billion to 6 billion.

Poirot,

Here is a link to the Global Footprint Network 2010 atlas

http://issuu.com/globalfootprintnetwork/docs/ecological-footprint-atlas-2010/1?mode=a_p

The atlas explains their methodology and gives the environmental footprints for countries in notional hectares of land, in terms of production, consumption (of both domestic and imported resources), imports, exports, and biocapacity (i.e. how much consumption per person the country would support without imports and without using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished). I recalculated on the basis of the consumption footprints, and it actually came to 38% of consumption due to the top billion, not 35%, so I must have remembered it wrong, but it is still a lot less than 86%. Global population is still growing at about 80 million people a year, mostly in the poorer countries. As Paul Ehrlich once said, "It doesn't matter if per capita consumption is low, if there are a hell of lot of caputs."

It is possible that Haber-Bosch and the Green Revolution will end up doing more harm than good, because without them, the global population would have crashed before serious harm could be done to our planetary life support systems. See page 7 of the atlas I cited above and

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html

open version without figures at

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

Of course, this would not be the fault of Haber, Bosch, or Borlaug, but of the people who stupidly abused some wonderful discoveries that could have made poverty history.