Publication: Free Inquiry
Publication Date: 01-AUG-04
Format: Online - approximately 2272 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Cohen, Mark Nathan
Article Excerpt
The earth's ability to support human life is usually described as the potential productivity of the world's food supply enhanced by human technological invention. The term most often applied is carrying capacity, which refers to the maximum size of any population (including people) that available resources can support without themselves being overconsumed to the point of extinction. The prevailing human model comes from Thomas Malthus, who argued that the ability of new technology stimulated by fortuitous invention to increase the human carrying capacity must eventually fall behind the geometrical expansion of the human population, resulting in misery, mass hunger, and starvation. (1) This is essentially an application of supply-side economics.
But the Malthusian argument ignores many other issues, including the importance of economic demand, the human history of population growth and technological change, and modern politics and culture. It also ignores the possibility that the human population may ultimately be limited by some resource other than food: perhaps water, epidemic disease organisms, or even limits on personal space with consequent dangerous psychological and biological results.
A reading of the archeological record suggests that during approximately the first 90 percent of human history (approximately ninety thousand years), human populations and their food needs played a major role in expanding the human food niche. Increasing economic demand forced increased labor, broadening of diets, exploitation of new environments, and the adoption of new "inventions."
AGRICULTURE: INVENTION OR RESPONSE?
Through most of our history, human population grew very slowly. Groups could respond to population growth by broadening their geographic range and exploiting a wider range of foods. This enlargement of the resource base may have been necessary because past overhunting had exceeded the carrying capacity of large game animals, essentially destroying this resource and making the exploitation of other resources necessary. (2)
Perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, the potential for territorial expansion was largely exhausted. Thereafter, population growth took place in tightly bounded territories. There is clear evidence, both in the organic remains and in the range of tools found, that human groups began in this period to exploit a wider range of...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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