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The two great economic revolutions that marked human history up to 1900—the agricultural and industrial revolutions—greatly increased the Earth's human carrying capacity, allowing human population to grow from 5 to 10 million people in 10,000 BCE to 1.5 billion in 1900. [44]
These were the references William R. Catton used in a 2008 "retrospective" [8] portraying his paradigm shift into environmental sociology. William Catton came of age in sociology when the major debates were about social-only theoretical orientations (structural-functionalism or consensus theory versus Marxism or conflict theory), and methodology (quantitative versus qualitative). [9]
The 1972 book The Limits to Growth discussed the limits to growth of society as a whole. This book included a computer-based model which predicted that the Earth would reach a carrying capacity of ten to fourteen billion people after some two hundred years, after which the human population would collapse. [7]
The belief that global population levels will become too large to sustain is a point of contentious debate. Those who believe global human overpopulation to be a valid concern, argue that increased levels of resource consumption and pollution exceed the environment's carrying capacity, leading to population overshoot. [18]
Rees is a founding member and recent past-President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics. He is also a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, a co-investigator in the "Global Integrity Project" aimed at defining the ecological and political requirements for biodiversity preservation, a founding director of the One Earth Initiative and a Director of the Real Green New Deal project.
Many studies have tried to estimate the world's sustainable population for humans, that is, the maximum population the world can host. [5] A 2004 meta-analysis of 69 such studies from 1694 until 2001 found the average predicted maximum number of people the Earth would ever have was 7.7 billion people, with lower and upper meta-bounds at 0.65 and 9.8 billion people, respectively.
Overconsumption – Resource use exceeding carrying capacity; Overpopulation – Proposed condition wherein human numbers exceed the carrying capacity of the environment; Peak oil – Point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction is reached
If this rate of resource use is not reduced, persistent overshoot would suggest the occurrence of continued ecological deterioration and a potentially permanent decrease in Earth's human carrying capacity. [36] [37] [38] In 2022, the average biologically productive area per person worldwide was approximately 1.6 global hectares (gha) per capita.