Has the Earth reached its carrying capacity?
In 1798, an English clergyman named Thomas Malthus made a dire prediction: He said the Earth could not indefinitely support an ever-increasing human population. The planet, he said, would check population growth through famine if humans didn’t check themselves. The theory publicized by Malthus is known as the carrying capacity of Earth. Carrying capacity itself is a well-known and widely accepted concept in ecology. It’s a very basic idea — sustainability requires balance. There is a certain population number above which a species starts to damage its habitat, and life as it stands at that moment cannot go on. Typically, it’s starvation that kicks in to cull the herds down to a manageable number. The idea of Earth’s carrying capacity goes something like this: Humans need certain resources to survive at subsistence level — most commonly air, food, water and usually some kind
