The crux of this era’s complex puzzle may lie with people. The number of people. Too many. Too many consumers. Consumers of space, of food, of transportation, of heating and cooling, of water, of any product we need or think we need.
Carrying capacity was generally used to assess the amount of land necessary to graze livestock. Given X number of acres with X amount of grass, you can graze X number of animals in a sustained way. Adding animals to this area would result in imbalance: grass would not get a chance to regerminate, trails and tracks would become rutted, erosion would carry away soil, stressed animals would compete and for ever more meager nourishment. This is not a sustainable situation required for farming. The farmer would need to either cut back on the herd or supplement feed and rotate animals from field to barn. Costs in dollars and time would rise.
All biological systems strive for a balanced carrying capacity: sustainability. It’s not surprising, therefore, that humans must be included in this model. We’ve all seen the charts and heard the dire warnings about population numbers. Scientist Thomas Malthus became concerned about the carrying capacity of humans on Earth way back in the 18th century. Demographers since then have been wary of the growing numbers of our species and its ability to be sustained.
Malthus couldn't have conceived how the timeline for population "overshoot" might extend itself. He could not have envisioned the extent of developing industrialization. The 19th and 20th century would encourage cultures to assume the carrying capacity of Earth could be expanded. And it was expanded, artificially, with the help of oil. Oil-run industry was able to promote a limitless sense of a modern lifestyle. It promoted growth. "Growth was good." Those of Earth’s cultures who were able, jumped on the evolving growth bandwagon.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell,” maintained the blunt Edward Abbey. In the 1960’s he was speaking as a defender of the natural environment that was being swallowed by development. More people were taking more land or degrading natural landscapes at alarming rates. Precious resources, such as fresh water, were becoming even more scarce.
Environmentalist cries like Abbey’s were often taken with a grain of salt back then. Societies were accustomed to the feel of growth and the confidence that technology and fossil fuels would handle all comers. Fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and other petro-chemicals were providing increased food production. Interstate highways were built and cars with single passengers commuted from new suburbs.
How did we get onto the treadmill of growth for growth’s sake? What exactly is a sustainable population? How do the numbers crunch? Are we back to the concept of finiteness?
Thoughts without graphs...
