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- Path: sparky!uunet!sun-barr!olivea!sgigate!rutgers!uwvax!meteor!tobis
- From: tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
- Newsgroups: sci.environment
- Subject: Re: population load question
- Message-ID: <1992Sep6.201433.4141@meteor.wisc.edu>
- Date: 6 Sep 92 20:14:33 GMT
- References: <1992Sep3.171421.5807@cs.rochester.edu> <1992Sep4.165811.9405@samba.oit.unc.edu> <1992Sep6.160027.11632@cs.rochester.edu>
- Organization: University of Wisconsin, Meteorology and Space Science
- Lines: 40
-
- In article <1992Sep6.160027.11632@cs.rochester.edu> dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz) writes:
- >In article <1992Sep4.165811.9405@samba.oit.unc.edu> Bruce.Scott@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Bruce Scott) writes:
- >>In article <1992Sep3.171421.5807@cs.rochester.edu> dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz) writes:
-
- >>>I hope you display more rigor in your physics than you do in this
- >>>posting. For starters, define "carrying capacity".
-
- >>Carrying capacity, n. Number of people who can live in a sustainable way
- >>in arable land areas of the earth's surface in reasonable comfort with
- >>reasonable nutrition.
-
- >Ah. With *what technology*? Only current technology? Technology of
- >1000 years ago? 1000 years from now? Your definition of "carrying
- >capacity" is so imprecise as to be useless.
-
- OK, how about...
-
- Carrying capacity, n. Number of people who can live in a sustainable way
- in arable land areas of the earth's surface in reasonable comfort with
- reasonable nutrition, at a given technology level, (where technology
- is broadly defined to include social, economic and governmental structures)
- sharing the planet with a large diverse self-sustaining population of
- other species.
-
- If the world turns out to be overpopulated at current technology levels
- (my own conclusion is that it is, but not yet overwhelmingly so), then we are
- sticking our necks out that technology growth will continue at a rate
- comparable to population growth. Sort of like deficit financing. It only hits
- the fan when there is a recession, and the growth that was assumed is suddenly
- missing.
-
- You may counter that technological growth has been far more steady than
- economic growth, but this reassures me little. It is clear to me that
- the technologies that we need to improve to stabilize the environment are
- not engineering or agricultural but social and economic techniques, and
- increasingly so. In such fields, the record of our species is much
- less impressive. The existence of technical methods has little value if
- the mechanisms for implementing those methods is absent.
-
- mt
-