[SustainableTompkins] Pacific Trash Vortex, Vol 22, Issue 23

[northsheep at juno.com]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:46:13 -0400 Thomas Shelley <tjs1 at cornell.edu>
writes:
> At 08:39 AM 10/24/2007 -0400, you wrote:
> 
> 
> >With all due respect, 6 billion people do not have to contemplate 
> the 
> >impact of their waste stream on the environment, only about 300 
> million 
> >Americans and about 300 million Europeans have too.  .....rest 
> deleted.....

> George--This was really a great response.   The recent research I 
> have 
> read suggests that even if the Amero-Euro populations were to reduce 
> there 
> overall consumption of everything by 80 percent, the carrying 
> capacity of 
> the Earth would be between .5B and 2 B people

My best guess of future carrying capacity is in this ball park as well.
Currently there is a wide range of future carrying capacity estimates -
partly because it is a complex concept that we have not learned to
understand and calculate from a properly holistic perspective. That is,
we have not learned to consider all the important variables and how they
interact. But it is good that we make the effort because carrying
capacity is a central concept of ecology and, I believe essential to
thinking and planning for the future. 

Here are two benchmarks I use to help me think about it. They are tied to
historical eras and population levels shaped by development of the two
latest forms of concentrated energy, coal and oil. When the coal age
began (circa 1800), global population was 1 billion. When the oil began
to significantly impact development and population (circa 1930), global
population was 2 billion. The reason they are benchmarks for me is that
they are nondebatable historical data. So we can think about the future
without coal or oil with this 1-2 billion population range as a point of
departure. 

Then we can argue about how future conditions, nonexistent at the start
of the coal/oil eras, might alter those figures.  Present and future
depletion of other finite resources, present and future degradation of
the global ecological resource base, and human overconsumption habits are
will tend to depress future carrying capacity below those pre-coal,
pre-oil levels. Accumulated knowledge since 1800 could help us raise
carrying capacity above that historical level. Many have great
expectations from technological development; I am more cautious about
finding truly sustainable technologies. So I tend to put more emphasis on
learning how to work more effectively with nature - managing soil and
water and the potential of biodiversity to capture solar energy, for
example.  We could do a lot to rebuild the ecological resource base,
bringing it back to better health and productive potential. 

Ecologist William Catton's Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of
Revolutionary Change, a book written 25 years ago, described the coal/oil
era as an anomaly of human history, an aberrant bubble during which these
sources of concentrated energy created a "phantom carrying capacity", one
that could not last. 

Karl North
Northland Sheep Dairy, Freetown, New York USA
     www.geocities.com/northsheep/
"Mother Nature never farms without animals" - Albert Howard
"Pueblo que canta no morira" - Cuban saying