Ridgerunner;3716223:
No I’m not saying that. I’m using cattle per pasture capacity as an analogy for the planet.
I can feed more cattle in a feedlot than on pasture…if I bring in the feed. Oil based fertalizers and pesticides, and cheap fuel transportation, has allowed for the greater crop yields to feed a denser population. Unless you can figure out how to grow food on another planet to bring to earth, at some point you will reach max capacity for the earth to meet human needs. You know that the carrying capacity of your pasture will only support so many cattle without overgrazing.
And it isn’t simply about running out of oil. At what point do you stop the feed lot when the feed gets too expensive to earn a profit? As oil for fuel and oilbased ag products get more and more expensive at what point do you stop using it on crops, settling for a lower yield but greater profit margin?
I realize there is a theoretical limit out there somewhere on the number of cattle a given amount of land will support. But since the assumptions about that are proved wrong with some frequency, and since many do not follow the best practices even if they know what they are, I’m puzzled as to why we should assume a particular number of cattle is the maximum. That’s particularly true if we assume the present number is the maximum, because it very clearly isn’t.
I realize we’re really not talking about cattle, exactly. But I am also puzzled as to why we should assume a given number of people on the earth is the maximum, particularly when we well know a great deal, and perhaps most, of the nutritional problems people face in the world are not caused by a lack of the earth’s carrying capacity, but by other things.