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For 95% of the past 200,000 years of human evolution, i.e., throughout our former hunter-gatherer period, humans actively made sure their populations did not exceed the carrying capacity of their land.
Starting with the technology of agriculture and our growing ability to support ever larger numbers, the imperative to limit reproduction began to relax and the population was allowed to rise ever closer to its limits, with occasional dire results, usually only temporary. Our growing indifference to limits was supercharged this past 300 years by our exploitation of fossil fuels, during which the human population has grown by a factor of 20 from 400 million to 8 billion. Any notion of limits has now all but disappeared. But limits remain, as witness the cascade of peak fossil fuel production events this century driving up costs. Affordable fossil fuels will be a thing of the past by mid-century and we will once again have to grapple with humane ways to limit our numbers and our demands on Earth’s resources, probably to around 10% of current levels.
Our political obsession with growth must end, without question, as must our near-total addiction to fossil fuels. This will necessitate, among other things, smaller families, growing our food organically and regenerating soils to natural ecological fertility.
Donovan C. Wilkin
Huntley