Source: GENETIC LITERACY PROJCET,7/10/18


In a recent Nature Sustainability paper, a team of scientists concluded that the Earth can sustain, at most, only 7 billion people at subsistence levels of consumption (and this June saw us at 7.6 billion). Achieving 'high life satisfaction’ for everyone, however, would transgress the Earth’s biophysical boundaries, leading to ecological collapse. In fact, we have been engineering our environments to more productively serve human needs for tens of millennia. ... What the palaeoarcheological record strongly suggests is that carrying capacity is not fixed. It is many orders of magnitude greater than it was when we began our journey on this planet.

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