Back in May, Growth is Madness! hosted a guest post by Dr. Russell Hopfenberg, a consulting faculty member at Duke University, “to discuss his work on the links between food supply, carrying capacity, and population growth. In two peer reviewed journal articles, one coauthored by David Pimentel, Russ has analyzed and investigated the relationship between between human population and food supply. His conclusion is that global food supply is the variable which best accounts for human carrying capacity, and that human population will continue to grow as long as food supply increases.”
Now you can read his the follow-up post at GIM and also watch & listen to Hopfenberg’s slide presentation at this link.
I find Hopfenberg’s ideas compelling but incomplete. For instance he doesn’t address regional variations in population growth, and it may be his result is trivially true while not being useful in thinking of ways to mitigate population pressure. I’ll post my extended remarks over at GIM.
Man, you’ve been cookin’ here lately!
I tend to agree about Hopfenberg’s ideas. I think they’re actually pretty important, but may not provide the whole answer.
A strong case essentially the same ideas, with some illuminating comments about Malthus as well, is made by Jason Godesky:
http://anthropik.com/2005/07/thesis-4-human-population-is-a-function-of-food-supply/
But your post on Iran suggests to me there may be more involved in bringing down fertility rates.
One other place I would quibble with Russ (which I’ll do before long in a comment under the post on GIM) concerns carrying capacity and overshoot. It’s not so much a disagreement, I don’t think, as a different way of looking at the same thing. He sees food supply as having continually lifted the carrying capacity for humans, which more or less leads to the conclusion that as long as we can keep increasing the food supply we’ll never be in overshoot.
I’d say our increasing the food supply has been a large factor in causing us to go into overshoot. It’s created a kind of “phantom carrying capacity” to borrow a term from Catton. And the ecological degradation our increasing numbers has caused will make sure it’s only temporary.
You have been memed.