Does the Earth have a Defined Carrying Capacity for Humans?
Introduction:
Having a population size that is not dangerously large is the limit where the population size is acceptable and understood as the defined carrying capacity for humans1. Population size and consumption can create stress on the environment through resources and social systems so that the quality of life declines. However some believe that resources can be created by humans and not all need to be replaced and reinvented once depleted, so resource availability may not be declining after all2. Although population growth increases economic growth in further investments of natural and renewable resources, consumption, increased population and limiting factors of carrying capacity will decrease the Earth’s ability to support and sustain us humans.
“Yes” argument:
The assumption that food is the limiting factor as observed by Malthus in 1798, do not grow as fast as populations. It becomes clear that limiting factors consist of several kinds when other species are considered. The limit factor can be space for example where the availability of places to hide from predators can be limited for some species such that availability of nesting material may be depleting along with water in dry regions1. Nicholson states that an inactive state of the population balance can be reached under constant environmental conditions through mechanisms sensitive to population density. As density decreases, intraspecific competition of a population increases so that the surviving population grows faster and the dense population grows slower1. He proposes that density-dependent feedback involving intraspecific competition push a population towards stability at its environmental limits...
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“We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us.” Tertullian, a philosopher from the third century had said this about our world when the population was mere 200 million. This statement can be taken two different ways. The first would be to think that our resources are limited and we need to be worried. The second would be to say people have been worried about overpopulation forever but everything seems to have worked out. There is no doubt that there are many people inhabiting this earth but the real question is if too many of us is a real threat to humanity.
Imagine the world where all the ice of the poles has melted away. Much of northern Europe is a part of the Atlantic Ocean. Florida is completely submerged underwater. Memphis Tennessee is now a coastal city along the Gulf Coast. It was different once. Cities like Miami and London use to be popular tourist destinations in the early 21st Century. All of the low lying cities like Miami, New Orleans, London, and Paris are under hundreds of feet of water. The ice locked in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica has melted away, dumping most of our freshwater into the seas. Much of our freshwater supply and farmland is not contaminated or swallowed by the rising oceans since the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melted. How could we as people prevent this massive disaster that the world has never been experienced before?
In 1994, the world population was 5 602 800 000. This population had a doubling time of only forty-one years (De Blij and Muller, 1994, p.527). The massive amount of people has had highly destructive impacts on the earth’s environment. These impacts occur on two levels: global and local. On the global level, there is the accumulation of green house gases that deplete the ozone layer, the extinction of species, and a global food shortage. On the local level, there is erosion of soils (and the loss of vegetation), the depletion of water supply, and toxification of the air and water. The earth is dynamic though, all of these aspects are interrelated, and no one impact is completely isolated. All of these destructive elements can be traced to our enormous population. As the population increases, so do all of the economic, social, and technological impacts.
Living things are categorized by being either a prey animal or a predator animal. A prey animal is what a predator eats and the predator animal is what eats the prey. A stable predator-prey relationship would be when there are more sheep than wolves. This is stable because the predators, which are the wolves, will have enough prey animals to eat. An unstable predator-prey relationship would be if there were more wolves than sheep. This relationship is unstable because the predators will not have enough food to eat. The goal of this investigation was to test stable environments and see when they would go unstable. The guided question was “which factors affect the stability of a predator-prey population size relationships?” This supports the background information because it brings up the question of what will disrupt the stability of an environment.
The human population passed the 7 billion mark in October of 2011, and will pass 8 and 9 billion probably before the middle of the century. All these people will need resources such as places to live, food to eat, and water to drink, and they will use energy and create waste. Essentially, human population growth can effect all other causes of extinction. For example, more people on the Earth means more people contributing to global warming and pollution. More people also means more clearing of land for agriculture and development.
Most people believe that the population of the world today is growing at an exponential rate. Environmentalists, politicians, and the concerned public are trying to prove that we are depleting our resources and are slowly killing ourselves. Others argue that technology and new inventions will fix and solve our population problems, and that the population growth is actually slowing down. .
Hardin argues how the world only has so many resources and opportunities for agriculture to be expended. Therefore, with enough increase in population, these resources will become extinct. Thus, humans will run out of food and eventually starve to death. As Hardin declares, “a finite world can only support a finite population” (Hardin 98).
Schmandt, Jurgen, and Ward, C.H. eds. Sustainable Development: The Challenge of Transition. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
This problem of population growth leads to a number of solutions that could have significant implications on the quality of life. Taking no action and allowing population to grow unchecked could possibly risk the entire human species if food or clean water were to become unavailable worldwide. Aiming for zero population growth would in theory maintain the existing quality of life since a stable population would not increase their use of resources. However not all resources are renewable, so scarcities could still occur with a fixed population size. In an extreme case permanent resource depletion under zero population growth could have the same extinction effect that unchecked growth can lead to. Despite the escalating risk of unchecked population growth, technological advances necessitated by the increase in population will at least maintain the quality of life and could possibly improve conditions.
[WCED] World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our common future. New York: Oxford University Press. 444p.
Carrying capacity is defined as how many organisms can survive sustainably in a certain region without destroying the resources. There are many limiting factors, such as shelter, abundance of food and water, predation, and many different factors can be the constraint that will determine the human carrying capacity. Human carrying capacity is the amount of people that can live on earth without destroying its future. Given the rapid population growth of Earth and our current failure to meet the simple basic needs of most of the world’s population, the human carrying capacity has become a serious concern. Earth could support a lot more people living a simple country lifestyle than an American suburban one. One degree that has been developed to evaluate carrying capacity on Earth is the ecological footprint, which shows each person individual share.
Overpopulation is a growing problem all over the world. This is a very important environmental issue and needs to be dealt with. This environmental problem is affecting many countries around the world, but mostly the poor and impoverished countries that don’t have the resources to help deal with these issues. It also affects the environment like plants, animal life and air quality. When the population of people expands we need more natural resources from the environment, so we consume more than we can produce.
‘Development that meets the needs of the present with the ability for the future generation to meet their own needs.’ (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987) Sustainable development requires three key components: economy, society and environment, sustainable development can be success through striking balance in those factors. These three components are indispensible, they compel to depend on each other. On the other words, we can only gain a decent and energetic environment and society if the economy is strong with a healthy a stable growth rate.
One of the problems facing our world is population. It began about ten thousand years ago when the humans settled and began farming. The farming provides more food for the people thus making the population grow. Now we are about 6 billion in population and in a few years we will be around 10 to 11 billion. Therefore, our population will almost double in size. This means that we will need more food to support us. A study in 1986 by Peter Vitonesk, a Stanford biologist, showed that the humans are already consuming about 38.8 of what is possible for us to eat. Thus, if the population keeps increasing, the percentage will increase also, making us closer and closer to the biophysical limits. By studying the earth's capacity, Dr. Cornell, another biologist, believes that we are already crowded for this would. He believes that our world can only support two million people. Not only this, but population can cause complicated problems to the countries with very high population. These countries will need more schools to educate its people, they will need more hospitals and public health to take care of their people, and they will need more water and more soil for farming to feed all the people. In order to solve the population growth problem, the people should be educated. Once the people are educated they will be aware of the problems they ca...
Efforts to improve the standard of living for humans--through the control of nature and the development of new products--have also resulted in the pollution, or contamination, of the environment. Much of the world's air, water, and land is now partially poisoned by chemical wastes. Some places have become uninhabitable. This pollution exposes people all around the globe to new risks from disease. Many species of plants and animals have become endangered or are now extinct. As a result of these developments, governments have passed laws to limit or reverse the threat of environmental pollution.