Population, Sustainability And Earth's Carrying Capacity

The twentieth century has been marked by a profound historical development: an unwitting evolution of the power to seriously impair human life-support systems. Nuclear weapons represent one source of this power. Yet, even the complexities of global arms control are dwarfed by those inherent in restraining run-away growth of the scale of the human enterprise, the second source of possible disaster. Diminishing the nuclear threat involves relatively few parties, well-established international protocols, alternate strategies that carry easily assessed costs and benefits, short- and long-term incentives that are largely congruent, and widespread recognition of the severity of the threat. In contrast, just the opposite applies to curbing the increasingly devastating impact of the human population.