Carry Capacity of Ecosystems and Graphic Rate of Overshoot Degraded Capacity Blog :

Carrying Capacity

Carrying capacity is a well-known ecological term that has an obvious and fairly intuitive meaning : "the maximum population size of a species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment". Unfortunately that definition becomes more nebulous the closer you look at it – especially when we start talking about the planetary carrying capacity for humans. Ecologists claim that our numbers have already surpassed the carrying capacity of the planet, while others (notably economists and politicians...) claim we are nowhere near it yet! I think the confusion arises because we intuitively conflate two very different understandings of the phrase. I call them the “outside” view and the “inside” view. The “outside” view of carrying capacity (I call it CCo) is the view of an observer who adopts a position outside the species in question. It’s the typical analytic/synthetic view of an ecologist looking at the reindeer on St. Matthew’s Island, or at the impact of humanity on other species and its own resource base. CCo is the view that is usually assumed by ecologists when they use the naked phrase “carrying capacity”, and it is an assessment that can only be arrived at through deductive reasoning. From this point of view humanity passed CCoa while ago. It probably happened between 1850 and 1950, depending on what factors you draw into your assessment, but we certainly passeed it before 1975. As you will see below, my estimate for when we passed it is surprisingly early - well before we were aware that it might be a problem.

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