From: Thomas Lunde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sitting and watching the "news" this morning, I was struck by the idea you
>challenged that "carrying capacity" is not a metaphor but a "scientifically
>explicit meaning". The question is, is the carrying capacity based on the
>standards of the American middle class, a Bangledesh mother in the middle
of
Remember the fable about the blind men describing elephant?
One of the blind men -- conventional economics -- is totally unfit to make
predictions about our future because it only looks at money. It is
completely blind to the material world.
Another blind man -- demography -- has the same problem as economics, except
it only looks at people.
Ecology looks at the entire elephant.
The reason for the endless confusion about "carrying capacity" is because
there are at least two different definitions in use. Demographers think in
terms of absolute numbers people, but ecologists define "carrying capacity"
in terms of "load on the system".
"An environment's carrying capacity is its maximum persistently supportable
load" (Catton 1986).
To find the "carrying capacity", one simply calculates the maximum load.
It's a scientifically-derived measure just like the Plimsol Line was on the
Titanic. If we are over the maximum load, we are over carrying capacity.
It's that simple -- it's called "overshoot".
Just as "floating" was a temporary condition for the Titanic, "overshoot" is
a temporary condition for us. Titanic ended in "sink", we end in "crash".
Jay -- www.dieoff.com
