Humanity for all its fool hearty bravado is not in control of this world, only nature and Gaia is in control of this reality despite our grand delusions of ourselves otherwise.
What exactly is the acceptable global population rate or number? Does that even exist at all?
What is the specific carrying capacity exactly? Nobody in these conversations ever states specifics and it instead revolves around vague platitudes or emotional sentiments.
Corbin is exactly right in saying "Ultimately, even if all resources are optimized and all waste is recycled, a closed system will always end up in the red. Something is inevitably lost to entropy. The only solution is to unclose the system." This is true whether the system is the Earth or whether its an engine. Luckily, the biosphere is not a closed system--energy from the sun is converted into mass by photosynthesizing organisms (or, more rarely, chemicals and heat from elsewhere is converted similarly by bacteria), which became the base of a complicated host of trophic interactions between organisms. Different ecosystems can support different levels of complexity (number of species, population sizes, etc.) based on a number of variables, including precipitation, temperature (mainly a function of location in proximity to the equator and altitude), and resource availability.
And none of that addresses the most important factor, are we basing the carrying capacity on how many humans we can cram onto this mudball at the expense of everything else...or are we accounting for the replenishment of resources and conservation of biodiversity? Functionally speaking, carrying capacity is the number of organisms that can survive on the available resources. By any measure, we passed that quite some time ago. Populations can exist beyond carrying capacity for a time, but inevitability there comes a crash. Are we calling human carrying capacity when we start dropping like flies, or when we start dropping everything else like flies?
Think of the Earth System as a bus that is overloaded. Up to a point each new rider has a “linear” impact—causing the bus to tilt a little more when it turns. No one pays much attention when another and then another rider climb on the bus. After all it just seems to cause the bus to tilt a little more each time. Then at some point, just one more added rider causes the bus to overturn as it rounds a corner. What had up to that point had a linear impact—one passenger equals a little more tilt—reaches a tipping point—one passenger equals an overturned bus. Continuing with the metaphor, several factors can influence the tipping, such as speed, weight of the passengers, condition of the suspension, sharpness of the turn, and so on. Some of these are contributing factors to the stress on the bus (e.g. weight of passengers) and others are factors which reduce the buses ability to handle that stress (e.g. the condition of the suspension).
https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdf...g_Capacity.pdf
https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdf...g_Capacity.pdf
Another way to look at carrying capacity is on what our resource use is compared to the Earth's ability to renew itself. If we look at it from this perspective, this year, on the 29th of July, the humans upon the planet will have used more than the earth can renew within a single year, based on the global biocapacity of 1.63 gha per person (gha=globally comparable, standardized hectacres=a representation of the amount of land needed to absorb our waste and generate new resources). Last year, it was 1 August. Before 1970, there was no overshoot day...and there were ~3.7 billion people on earth.
Or we can look at food production--if all the world were vegetarians, based purely on land use and the food system as it exists now (which fails to account for declining yields from warming temperatures and unstable growing seasons, soil erosion and nutrient loss, water shortages, etc.), carrying capacity is about 10 billion...if all the world starts eating (and using farmland) like an American, its around 2.5 billion.
...basically, its complicated and it depends on the variables assessed and the criteria for defining what we mean by human carrying capacity
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