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

Re: All things must end...

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Overpopulation causes species to go extinct?

The inability to adapt is typically what does it. Overpopulation might lead to disease, famine, and possibly a return to a preindustrialized economy, but I don't think you can come up with an example of a species which overpopulated itself to extinction.

Re: All things must end...

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

Easter Island

Re: All things must end...

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

When the Dutch arrived, there were still a couple thousand people living there, hardly extinction. It wasn't until European diseases were introduced that the island was depopulated.