I have thought this fact was true for years. Dr. Frank Baxter brought this idea up during the Bell Telephone science series in the 1950's when he projected the idea of diminishing resources even back then. And he he even added how technology was NOT going to be enough replenish resources used because of overpopulation.

Gore Vidal made comment to this same idea in the 1960's as well in an interview. I believe there is a clip at the end of Fellini's move "Roma" where Vidal says this fact.

What is amazing about the graph is when we passed the threshold and how it continues to widen. No wonder we have so much trouble.

To take the easy argument first, the numbers in the article above were from 2008. Now, over four years later population has increased from 6.7B to 7.1B. At the same time the biocapacity of the planet has decreased. So our overshoot by this method of calculation is now probably up from 50% to around 65%.

Every year we spend in overshoot degrades the residual carrying capacity of the planet. If we’ve spent the last 42 years in overshoot, going from 0% to 65% in that time, then a simple calculation of the area under the curve indicates that we’ve used up over a dozen planets’ worth of biocapacity in that time – biocapacity that has not had a chance to regenerate. Last time I looked we still only had one planet to tear apart. We’re far more overdrawn at the bio-bank than a simple annual number of 50% would make it appear.

But the story is never quite that simple. When you look at what has enabled our overshoot there is one and only one answer – fossil carbon. by measuring our overshoot since we began that trajectory, it’s easy to conclude that we have been in overshoot since about 1800. The growing droughts and floods caused by AGW are evidence of the degradation of carrying capacity that inevitably accompanies overshoot.

If we accept the premise that every overshoot eventually self-corrects one way or another, the implication is that the final stable carrying capacity of the planet will be lower than it is today. How much lower? the way I estimate it is that is to start with the population we had when the overshoot began (say around 1800), subtract some factor to account for our degradation of the planet’s carrying capacity since then, and add back two factors: one to account for our growth in knowledge, plus another to address the extent to which we have usurped the habitat of other species.

For the sake of argument let’s try some numbers. In 1800 the population was around one billion. We may have degraded the original biocapacity of the planet since then by a third. Let’s say we have bought back a third of that shortfall by building our knowledge, and another third by extirpating other species. Those assumptions would leave the planet with a truly sustainable, long-term carrying capacity for something less than 800 million humans.

Whether this is a realistic estimate, or says anything about how events will unfold over the next century or two will remain open questions - as will any Nostradamian predictions about how the process might affect different places in the world. But what we already know of ecology hints that these are thoughts to be taken seriously, and should be factored into what we do next.

And there we run into the last hurdle. “What we do next” is informed by what kind of creatures we are, what we’ve done in the past, and our inability as a species to see more than a few weeks into the future with any kind of urgency. That means that reactive muddling-though will continue to be the order of the day. And not even God herself knows where that will end up.

But given that humans are so clever at extracting energy stored over millions of years we can probably get away with postponing that crash for a while. Just how long is hard to say. But each year that the inevitable crash is postponed allows people to be just that much more complacent in ignoring the coming crisis. Our global supply system has become extremely brittle and when the crash begins in earnest I have a hunch it will hit so hard and so fast that people won't know what happened. It will be like a small crack in the dam that is now dripping "harmlessly" but which could result in the entire dam bursting without warning.

But the unlimited growth mandate we live by will eventually overcome even that.

Humans really are a virus, and we're going to keep going until we burn it all out...and then some of us are going to sneak away to other planet and do it again.

But the longer we succeed at that, the worse the endgame becomes. You can't cheat Mother Nature in the long run.

I doubt we'll infect any other planets - we can't even get back to the moon for an overnight stay, and this is about as good as it's going to get in terms of energy, resources and organization. If I were a sentient species on another planet I'd be breathing a huge sigh of relief at that news.

We'll cheat to the point that we absolutely crash the system. I also think some of us will get away and break someplace else, not because I think we're currently capable, but because we have that *drive.*

Our species was wiped out to 2000 individuals 70,000 years ago. Now we're threatening the life of 80% of the species on the planet. Some drive we have, huh?

Our population never went as low as 2,000; we'd have been wiped out in the long term with that kind of decimation(diseases and defects due to inbreeding, etc.). Most well-researched estimates generally agree on the 50,000-100,000 range(which is itself pretty low!).

I always thought the 2000 number was low, because a good sneeze would have meant we were done. Whatever the number was though, it killed a good percentage of our genetic variation, to the point that we're probably all related(and shouldn't be killing each other).

Should be interesting to see what our survival instinct will lead us to do as we crash the system though

stop you in this forum, ... it is a part of the mix. Your side is needed too. hrh.

you need collective human consciousness, and it is not happening, ... oh well!

Back to the garden, it is much less painful.