carrying capacity and crisis

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Jones sees the coming crisis as based upon lack of oil caused not just
by limited reserves but alos a capital shortage so great as to hinder
development of those reserves because of an accumulation crisis. In the
background there seems to be the assumption that somehow Liebig's law of the
minimum applies. However in the first instance that law applies to organisms
such as plants. Without a minimum of some factors plants will simply die.
Plant production is limited to to the point at which the minimal amount of
any requisite factor is no longer available.  This insight seems to be
applied in a more general way to complex systems that are not  literally
organisms- but in that context its application is questionable.
     It would seem  that as a source of energy for capitalism oil would be a
prime candidate to illustrate Liebig's law as it applies to the complex
system of capitalism.
               At a certain point, long before supplies run out, there will
be such a shortage of oil at affordable prices, that the system can no
longer be self sustaining. The minimum amount of oil for the complex system
to function will no longer be forthcoming. Hence you have crisis and
collapse of the sort predicted by Mark Jones.

However there are problems with that scenario. Plants are organisms. We know
that without minimum amounts of essential factors they are quite limited in
their adaptability and either will not survive or as with grains growing in
infertile soil will be very unproductive. However capitalism is not an
organism. Surely in earlier periods of capitalist development a minimum of
oil was not essential. It does not seem then that oil is a factor that
exemplifies Liebig's law of the minimum, even though it may be true that
below a certain minimum of oil consumption severe problems or crises might
beset the capitalist system. But capitalism at least has the theoretical
possibility of finding alternative energy sources for oil. There is nothing
that I can see comparable to this in the situation of plants and organisms
the original locus for the application of Liebig's law.
Mark claims that these alternatives are fanciful, too costly, etc.etc. He
may be right. Nevertheless,I think he indulges in remarkable rhetorical
excess and sometimes evasion in response to opponents who argue for a more
optimistic scenario, and  is just plain wrong about some particular matters.
I just wonder if the whole issue of crisis might be formulated in a
different way. For example, as in the passages below. The author does not
identify the causes of the present and growing crisis as being caused by
capitalism but obviously it is. There are passages in it that have a family
resemblance to Marx's concept of the metabolic rift. The basic crisis of
capitalism is the continual depletion of natural capital with no prospect of
this capital being replaced. Capitalist trade increases the rate of
depletion as both organic and inorganic natural resources are exploited
throughout the globe and in particular underdeveloped countries may be led
to sell their natural resources at bargain prices without considering
replacement costs or that they may not be replaceable at all.
            Technology too may be negative--as well as positive. Giant
refrigeration ships, more efficient nets, radar fish locating devices, all
lead
to overfishing and more rapid depletion of natural capital to the point that
fish stocks may never recover and certain species may be even threatened
with extinction. This is not to deny positive functions to technology of
course. Technology may aid as in fish ladders for spawning ...
There is nothing primitivist implied. There are of course some applications
of this general model that might be used for racist ends and to argue for
limiting populations of certain groups, or to argue that it is impossible to
have the "standard of living' of developed countries in developing or
underdeveloped countries...In fact I recently read a submission to Dimension
that made precisely this argument. That a model might be misused does not
mean that it does not have some truth to it..


Cheers, Ken Hanly


The following comes from http://dieoff.org/page110.htm



We can now redefine human carrying capacity as the maximum rates of resource
harvesting and waste generation (the maximum load) that can be sustained
indefinitely without progressively impairing the productivity and functional
integrity of relevant ecosystems wherever the latter may be located. The
size of the corresponding population would be a function of technological
sophistication and mean per capita material standards (Rees, 1988). This
definition reminds us that regardless of the state of technology, humankind
depends on a variety of ecological goods and services provided by nature and
that for sustainability, these must be available in increasing quantities
from somewhere on the planet as population and mean per capita resource
consumption increase (see also Overby, 1985).

Now, as noted earlier, a fundamental question for ecological economics is
whether supplies of natural capital will be adequate to meet anticipated
demand into the next century. Inverting the standard carrying capacity ratio
suggests a powerful way to address this critical issue. Rather than asking
what population a particular region can support sustainably, the carrying
capacity question becomes: How large an area of productive land is needed to
sustain a defined population indefinitely, wherever on Earth that land is
located? (Rees, 1992; Rees & Wackernagel, 1994; Wackernagel & Rees, 1995).
Since many forms of natural income (resource and service flows) are produced
by terrestrial ecosystems and associated water bodies, it should be possible
to estimate the area of land/water required to produce sustainably the
quantity of any resource or ecological service used by a defined population
at a given level of technology. The sum of such calculations for all
significant categories of consumption would give us a conservative
area-based estimate of the natural capital requirements for that population.


A simple mental exercise serves to illustrate the ecological reality behind
this approach. Imagine what would happen to any modern human settlement or
urban region, as defined by its political boundaries or the area of built-up
land, if it were enclosed in a glass or plastic hemisphere completely closed
to material flows. Clearly the city would cease to function and its
inhabitants would perish within a few days. The population and economy
contained by the capsule would have been cut off from both vital resources
and essential waste sinks leaving it to starve and suffocate at the same
time. In other words, the ecosystems contained within our imaginary human
terrarium would have insufficient carrying capacity to service the
ecological load imposed by the contained population.

This mental model illustrates the simple fact is that as a result of high
population densities, the enormous increase in per capita energy and
material consumption made possible by (and required by) technology, and
universally increasing dependencies on trade, the ecological locations of
human settlements no longer coincide with their geographic locations.
Twentieth century cities and industrial regions are dependent for survival
and growth on a vast and increasingly global hinterland of ecologically
productive landscapes. It seems that in purely ecological terms, modern
settlements have become the human equivalent of cattle feedlots!

Cities necessarily appropriate the ecological output and life support
functions of distant regions all over the world through commercial trade and
the natural biogeochemical cycles of energy and material. Indeed, the annual
flows of natural income required by any defined population can be called its
"appropriated carrying capacity. Since for every material flow there must be
a corresponding land/ecosystem source or sink, the total area of land/water
required to sustain these flows on a continuous basis is the true
"ecological footprint" of the referent population on the Earth. (See Box 3
for definitions of these and related indicators.) Calculating its ecological
footprint provides a rough measure of the natural capital requirements of
any subject population for comparison with available supply.