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

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

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?

Comments

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

Arrowheads and irrigation are technological innovations. As is the plow, the tractor and genetically modified foods. All of these work to increase the yield per unit value. It makes it so that we can produce more than ample food using less acreage and resources (agronomics).

The key is to find ways to add technological and political infrastructure to cover the pockets of scarcity that still exist.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

So there actually is no "true carrying capacity" for people that leaves out "the impact of technology" -- because technology is inherent in the idea of "people."

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

Technology is inherent in the idea of agriculture.