MattV
I ar a kolij stoodint
Registered: Jul 2002
Location: In the back country. "Lib. Free or Die"
Posts: 9728 |
Re: Carrying Capacity
quote:
Originally posted by CYBERSQUID
It is a blatant and odious fallacy to equate existing and open or "unused" spaces with the kind of resources and productive land needed to support human life under modern conditions. In fact, the criterion for determining whether a region is overpopulated is not land area, but carrying capacity.
Carrying capacity refers to the number of individuals who can be supported in a given area within natural resource limits, and without degrading the natural social, cultural and economic environment for present and future generations.
Can such a yardstick be realistically applied to the Hawaiian Islands? If the state had to rely on it's own natural resources, there would be no modern infrastructure or society. Hawaii simply doesn't have the resources to even build, let alone maintain, a modern infrastructure.
Nearly everything needed to support modern society in Hawaii is imported, from toilet paper to cheap sunglasses to the computers without which a modern society today could not function. Bearing this in mind, we see that the "footprint" covers an area outside of the islands themselves.
The population of the islands could be triple, quadrupled, quintupled - the island chain could become a chain of people stacked on top of each other - as long as there was a supply of goods from outside necessary to support them.
The question then becomes one of quality over quantity. The larger the quantity of people in a given area, the lower the quality of life in that area. But even that is a subjective judgment. I can't understand why someone would want to live in New York - everyone crowded together shoulder to shoulder, the crime, no forests or lakes, rivers or streams (that aren't toxic, I mean), no wildlife - sounds like something Dante would have conjured. But someone brought up in New York wouldn't understand the attraction of living "in the middle of nowhere". I have a friend that moved here from northern New Jersey. She's still scared of driving down country roads at night because they don't have street lights. And she's been here for six years!
So the question isn't so much one of how many people can be sustained in an area, but one of balancing population and the preservation of the natural aesthetics that increasing population inevitably subsumes.
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Carrying Capacity
Sep. 18, 2007 02:16 PM
