Spaceship Earth Population and Carrying Capacity

Spaceship Earth

Population and Carrying Capacity

An Introduction to Ecological Economics, Robert Costanza et al., pp.108-109:

Cultural evolution has a profound effect on human impacts on the environment. … in terms of their carrying capacity, humans are many subspecies. Each subspecies would have to be culturally defined to determine levels of resource use and carrying capacity. … We think in best to … speak of the product of population and per capita resource use as the total impact of the human population. It is this total impact that the earth has a capacity to carry, and it is up to society to divide it between numbers of people and per capita resource use. This complicates population policy enormously, since one cannot simply state a maximum population, but rather must state a maximum number of impact units. How many impact units the earth can sustain and how to distribute these impact units over the population is a dicey problem indeed, … .

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