Article Review: Human Population, Carrying Capacity, and Resource Use
It is easy to forget that human beings are animals and that they must follow the same ecological and biological rules as the rest of the animal kingdom. Humanity has the biggest ecological footprint-- the amount of land that it would take to provide all the resources for a population and take care of its waste-- of any animal in the animal kingdom. Calculating the carrying capacity of the world for humanity is difficult, but research suggests that the ecological footprint of humanity is growing to the point where the earth may not be able to support the type of growth and use that humanity is responsible for much longer.
Ecological footprint is affected by many different things. For instance, an individual with meat-based diet has a larger ecological footprint than one with a vegetable-based diet. With much of the world eating a meat-based diet and urbanization, population growth, carbon dioxide emissions higher than ever before, birth rates rising and life expectancy becoming longer and longer, the earth is quickly reaching its carrying capacity for humanity.
Another issue this article addresses is the issue of how a woman’s place in society affects birth rates and infant mortality. The more educated the woman is, the article says, the older she is when she marries, and the more likely she is to have fewer children. In countries where women are likely to have many children, infant and child mortality rates are often high, and many children do not make it to adulthood.
In some countries, traditionally large families have become a problem: for instance, in China, the government has limited each family to a single child in an attempt to slow population growth. India, on the other hand, has begun to use education as a way to slow population growth to great success.
The article also addresses the international community’s attempts to slow population growth, maternal mortality, and infant mortality rates. This has been attempted through educational programs for women, and has had resounding success in the past decade.
New technologies that support population growth have been important in sustaining the human population, the article writes, but they cannot sustain population growth forever. Some research in the past has suggested that agricultural output would quickly be outstripped by human population growth and that this disparity would lead to violence, famine, and other catastrophic events for the human population; however, this was not the case, as humanity managed to engineer new technologies that helped sustain its population growth.
The article mentions Esther Boserup’s technocenterist research, and suggests that new technologies geared towards sustainable living should be developed. Essentially, she argued, humanity would continue to grow as long as technology was available to support the growth; as technology became obsolete, humanity would develop new technologies that supported its continued growth.
Some scientists argue that the earth cannot sustain a human population of 10 billion people, and that if the population ever reaches such high numbers, there will be significant problems for humanity as a whole. However, taking Boserup’s research into account, if humanity begins to develop sustainable technologies that can increase the earth’s carrying capacity for humanity, then the population level could conceivably reach these levels.
