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

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

I thought it was feminists who said men weren't necessary, they were surplus to requirements.

But yeah, all those white people practicing female infanticide in India, all those white christian muslims giving women unequal rights in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. It really is disgusting what those white conservative males do, and so on topic to the rest of the OP.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Crocodiles select to attack only women or there's something I'm missing here?

Hungry, hungry... well you get it

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Hippos are responsible for more deaths in Africa than any other animal. But I don't think they can really help with overpopulation issues and resource scarcity.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Kudos for the effort you put into writing a simple post in comprehensible language. You did try to cheat a bit by writing overly complex sentences. Next time, try to restrict yourself to extremely simple ones.

Also, you're still not quite proofing carefully enough. Notice how your last paragraph contains unnecessary line-breaks. And you're still allowing errors like "estimate" instead of "estimated" to get by you.

But the next step will be to focus a little more on the coherence of your assertions. The pot-shot at "Conservatives," for example, was unwarranted. Stick to your main point.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

That people starve, dehydrate and die by predation and disease is the natural state of humankind. We are already well past earth's true carrying capacity if you leave out the impact of technology on production and distribution infrastructure. Without it we are left with nothing but nature. Nature doesn't care whether humans live or die, we do.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Earth's true carrying capacity is an ideal number of statisticians that would not reflect a real world scenario inhabited by flawed human beings.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

First off, production is not the problem, as has been pointed out elsewhere. Where there is famine in this day in age, wherever there is famine it can be traced to a root in political policy. It has nothing to do with "birth control."

As far as "thinning the human herd," if you are willing to endorse such a thing, I politely offer you the option of going first in the effort to "reduce the surplus population."

All things must end...

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

We did just fine living with nature in a preindustrialized society. As soon as we became industrialized, we began consuming more and more, having just as many babies, and the ability to postpone death came with it. That allowed people to live to older ages, and more of the babies to survive their first couple of years - and to become adults - and breed themselves. That's what got us out of the equilibrium we were in, and what caused massive overpopulation, and what will drive us to extinction. Even in natural ecosystems, destabilizing it causes some populations to go away or become extinct and cause other populations to over-produce. Like it or not, humans are another species within the ecosystem, and subject to the same rules and trends.

Like a good story, there is a beginning a middle and an end. Existence is no different. The final product of evolution is extinction.

Flibbertygibbets!

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

You just keep right on breeding and don't worry your pretty little head
Everyone knows Jeebus is going to come back before anything bad can happen.

Actually, the real brake is energy.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

As you'll see increasingly over the next decade.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Worrying about overpopulation requires taking responsibility for ourselves.

[musicpsych.livejournal.com]

Unnecessary war?
Incurable/untreatable disease?
Famine?
Carcinogens?
Drugs?
Loosen regulations related to food quality/drug quality/water quality?
Reduce life expectancy?
Promote delaying childbirth? (e.g., instead of having a kid at 18, have a kid at 30 after college, grad/med school, establishing yourself professionally)

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

We already have the means to keep human population at a reasonable level. Educate women, lower infant mortality with basic public health measures, and free people from the back-breaking labor of working the land so they don't need as many children to help. This is why Europe's population is shrinking. There's really no secret to any of these, it is just that there is a general lack of political will (everywhere) to carry these things out.

[oportet.livejournal.com]

We could clone more crocodiles, maybe try to genetically alter them to be larger, and able to fly to even out population 'stabilization'.

[thies.livejournal.com]

I'm more concerned about at which point this shithole will be run too far into the ground to get off of it.

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

This is a tough issue for me.

I think any measure interfering with a person's right to have children is a severe infringement on their rights. On the other hand, I can see where our growing population can (and, I believe, already has in some places) lead to disaster. The ideal world population would be less than what it is right now.

Perhaps a good approach would be to give people an incentive to have fewer children. Maybe a financial reward for sticking to two? But that requires putting more money through the government, and we're already way in over our heads there. So that might not be the best, after all.

In the end, I think it comes down to education - such a fundamentally important part of the approach to solving almost any problem, it seems. Educated people are more likely to have smaller families for a number of reasons - they understand how to use birth control, they can provide for their families without needing children to help with agricultural work, they understand the population issue, and of course, they tend to put off starting a family until they've finished their education.