He sums up a lot of information including.

the amount of land needed to grow enough food to feed a person has plummeted from about one-and-a-quarter acres in 1950 to about half an acre today. Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, finds, “If the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s US corn grower during the next 70 years, ten billion people eating as people now on average do will need only half of today’s cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia. This will happen if farmers sustain the yearly 2 percent worldwide yield growth of grains achieved since 1960, in other words if social learning continues as usual.”

And what about water? Americans are using less water per capita too. Water withdrawals peaked in 1980 and have been flat since.

But note this:

Just what are all those “unnecessary things” that allegedly clog our shopping malls? Which does Revkin think we should want to give up? He mentions not a single product—yet … 246 varieties of dog food and 165 kinds of cat food, and even Valentine gifts for your favorite mutt?

The brown dog meme has legs.