talkpolitics | What is Earth's true 'carrying capacity', in human terms?

When the deer on Vancouver Island got to dangerously high levels, Conservationists re introduced a wolf pack back into the ecology. The deer stopped eating themselves out of house and home and returned to a level of population that their island home could support. Maybe Planet Earth is over run with people, and you have to be cruel to be kind and somehow start to 'thin the Human herd'?

In some African nations, women are regularly attacked and killed by crocodiles. But people accept this as inevitable in the same way that Western people accept road traffic accidents as just an inevitable fact of life.
Neither predators nor accidents have a significant affect on population levels.

In spite of famines, plagues and other natural disasters, human populations continue to steadily rise.
The real brake on human population levels is contraception, most widely practised in the (underpopulated) West.
The UN estimate once that Earth could support 12 billion people; Conservatives in the past have tried to prioritise jobs, income and education towards white men men and regard even white women as somehow 'more expendable' or 'surplus to requirements' - so what is Earth's true carrying capacity, and how do we arrange to meet it?

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Hippos are responsible for more deaths in Africa than any other animal.

Yes, this is also true, according to my sources.
But is ' scarcity' the right word?
To be sure, the world has finite resources- about enough to be adequate for double the present population. Sadly we are not using it to full capacity and fighting over what meagre resources our hopeless and wasteful system can procure.
And seeing a social elite gets the most of course.

It would be better if our social elites got off their duffs and saw to it that we all got fed and housed properly. Women and children included.

Edited 2011-07-23 09:04 (UTC)

True, we're not using everything to full capacity - to do so would involve wiping out all non-domesticated animals and farming/ranching every inch of forest, etc. Things that hopefully will never happen. Oil, fresh water, that stuff has practical limits, part of why there is so much maneuvering to maintain control over sources.

As for the social elites, the film 2012 provides a fictional portrayal of such and as we've seen again and again, they'll take care of themselves first. That's just being realistic.

Yet we are running at a mere 50% of full capacity, it seems , and doing lousy job.

Yes, social elites are doing what they have always done. they say that they can fix problems , but often they are the problem.

For my money, it's birth control, equal rights for women and smaller armed forces we need. Britain is a world leader in this at present, with an army that has been reduced to it's lowest level since the Boer War. Smaller military Establishments fight smaller and shorter wars, don't you think?

Compare the Falklands to Vietnam .

Smaller military Establishments fight smaller and shorter wars, don't you think?

France fought a real short one 70 years ago.

really? which on was that?

As I recall , they fought in WW2, and it went on several years. you maybe forget that De Gaul led the Free French from the UK.

French defeat, I think, lay in their reliance on the maginot line.

Compare Israel and Switzerland, that have a small army, but a big reserve force that can swiftly mobilise , and also tend to mobilise for home defence and not military expeditions abroad.

I think this may be the way to go in future.

As I recall they surrendered rather quickly as their army was to small to defend against the Nazis.

That's not accurate. The democracies in 1940 outnumbered the Nazis and had better military equipment. There was an instance where Mark II and Mark III Panzers dogpiled a single Char tank and hit it some 40 times, an all of them were destroyed while the Char never got seriously damaged despite the aforementioned 40 hits. The Nazis wrong-footed the democracies strategically and put all their armor in concentrated form as opposed to dribbling it all over the place, in reality had France bothered with armored divisions WWII would have ended in 1940.

Not according to Len Deighton.

As Underlankens has pointed out, the French army had the numbers and the kit to take on Germany. The real problem was the German style of fighting had changed.

Blitzkrieg was about overwhelming the enemy quickly and Psychologically. And the swift moving panzer columns did this by creating confusion as much as physical destruction.

His last sentence is a joke, but I could see I'm a bit off as to why France surrendered so quickly. But, it took a lot of money and soldiers to defeat the Nazis.

The Thirty Years War and Eighty Years War argue that smaller military factions can fight very long low-intensity wars.

Social elites can only do so much. They are a small number. To maximize the potential of the human race and to make most efficient use of the resources at hand, it will be necessary for everyone to pitch in.

What is Earth's true 'carrying capacity', in human terms?

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