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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]
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]
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]
Once the population has reached its carrying capacity, it will stabilize and the exponential curve will level off towards the carrying capacity, which is usually when a population has depleted most its natural resources. [25] In the world human population, growth may be said to have been following a linear trend throughout the last few decades. [8]
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.
By war, with or without weapons of mass destruction, starvation, disease, rape, murder, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, and other horrors beyond the imagination, when humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth. By the voluntary action of all of humanity prior to the human population exceeding the carrying capacity of the Earth.
The maximum endurable impact is called the carrying capacity. As long as "I" is less than the carrying capacity the associated population, affluence, and technology that make up "I" can be perpetually endured. If "I" exceeds the carrying capacity, then the system is said to be in overshoot, which may only be a temporary state. Overshoot may ...
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.