carrying capacity

To some the earth looks overcrowded as it is. To others there is still much open space left. Years ago, I borrowed a motor home from one of my friends to go visit the American West. I had never been there. Before I left he told me I would see how much open space was left. And he was right. We drove across hundreds of miles of empty space with barely a creature in sight. No doubt my friend thought these acres would all one day be filled with suburbs and gated communities like the one he lived in in Orange County. There was only one problem. A problem that is easy to overlook from an air conditioned motor home with a stocked refrigerator. No water.

For people who grew up watching 2001, Star Wars and other movies that show a future of mega-cities with high rises reaching into the stratosphere, and many layers of aerial traffic, it may appear that we have a ways to go. So what if the luddites say it can never happen? Did they not say that about trains and automobiles too? Clearly, the sky is the limit when it comes to success. Soon we will have buildings that reach up for miles, space hotels flying around in orbit, and bases on the moon and mars. Or will we?

Unfortunately, the movie set designers never consider the real logistics of their creations. How does one feed all these people? Where does all the waste go? Where does the energy come from to power all these vehicles, air- and space-craft? And what about the inevitable pollutants? These are all real issues that matter. Take the simple sky-scraper for example. Already, current designs lose huge amounts of space for ventilation shafts, heating and cooling, cabling, elevators, stairs and what have you. The higher you go the worse it gets. Soon what limits you is not how high you can build, but how much real usable space you get. Sure that may not matter so much for one or two buildings, whose main purpose is to impress visitors from other nations, but putting your whole population in monster buildings does create serious problems. The best sky scrapers are the ones that are largely empty.

I would venture to say that we are near carrying capacity on the planet. Unless we were to adopt stringent restrictions and rationing, our ability to feed people will soon be under stress. And that is true even if we leave nearly 1 billion people hungry as is. That is one sixth of the population. The US makes up one twentieth of the earth's population but it uses more than one quarter of the available resources. We do not have enough resources to bring just China or India up to our current level, let alone both of them.

The problem is not just food. We are also polluting at an extremely high rate. Pollution other than air, is nearly invisible in the West because we are very good at dumping our trash somewhere else. And we are dumping enormous amounts of it. Furthermore increasing percentages of it are harmful in one way or another and they do pollute groundwater and other precious and limited resources. If other countries started generating trash at the rate we do, pretty soon it would become quite visible to all.

There are areas in this country where resource destruction is quite visible. What is always so striking about these places is not just the destruction, but the enormous amount of waste surrounding it. Clearly, these scars are not going to disappear anytime soon, unless we are prepared to spend big dollars.

Already the gaseous pollution is there for everyone to see. CO2 levels are rising. Methane levels are rising. And the planet is experiencing a greenhouse warming effect that will stay with us for centuries to come. Even if we were to stop adding greenhouse gases today, the effect would be there one hundred years from now.

It is no longer sufficient for us to find a new source of energy to sustain our appetites. We need to also find an effective way to deal with our refuse. That will ultimately prove to be a much harder problem. One more reason to start conserving and to reduce waste today. There isn't much time to left to lose.