Figure 18.23: Rows of a single crop and heavy machinery are normal sights for modern day
farms. ( 15 )
a single farmer produced enough food for 2.5 people, but now a farmer can feed more than
130 people. Due to this increased productivity, the Green Revolution is credited for feeding
1 billion people that would not otherwise have been able to live.
The flip side of this is that for the population to continue to grow, more advances in agri-
culture will be needed. We’ve increased the carrying capacity for humans by our genius:
growing crops, trading for needed materials, and designing ways to exploit resources that
are difficult to get at, like groundwater. The question is, even though we have increased the
carrying capacity of the planet, have we now exceeded it? Are humans on Earth experiencing
overpopulation?
There are many different opinions about human population growth. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, Thomas Malthus predicted that human population would continue to grow until we
had exhausted our resources. At that point, humans would become victims of famine, disease
or war. Some scientists think that the carrying capacity of the planet is around 1 billion
people, not the almost 7 billion people we have today. How did we get to where we are
today? Many of our limiting factors have changed as we have used our intelligence and
technology to expand our resources. Can we continue to do this into the future? Do we now
have more people and more impacts on our environment than the Earth can handle?