what factors have increased earths carrying capacity for humans?

Question

carrying capacity being the maximum population size that a given environment can hold

Answer 1

Well carrying capacity of earth is always the same. When the safety factor is exceeded nothing improves. If the carrying capacity seems rising that means we havnt reached the foctor of safety limits.

Answer 2

Just because an environment holds a given number of people doesn't mean that it should. The earth's capacity hasn't increased but we have more or less adapted to overcrowding. The environment can provide only so many resources for survival but we "create" our own food source - we create disease-resistant produce, we raise animals for food. We manipulate the environment. We don't hunt, we shop. Our numbers aren't effectively controlled by weather (we turn up the heat or the A/C), predators (including eachother) or disease (vaccines, meds, surgeries, nursing homes). Probably the number one factor is technology, always many steps ahead of our evolutionary accomplishments.

Answer 3

The use of "stored" carying capacity in the form of fossil fuels has increased the earth's capacity to support humans. By relying on past sources of energy we can devote the renewable to food and shelter. This is a short term solution but it has certainly helped get us to where we are at. The use of the motor has allowed us to stop keeping large numbers of animals for use in transportation.

The improvements of agriculture and scientific forestry have helped a lot. Most agricultural yields are 2-4 times the yield per acre of 100 years ago. The yields of modern crops are also much higher than undomesticated wild plants.

The developments of cheap efficient transportation allows surplus resources of one region to be moved to support populations in different areas where they may be needed. Few places have all of the resources needed to support people equally usually one or more resource is in surplus locally while others are in shorter supply. Transportation and trade allows us to even out those differences.

Effective storage of surplus food as a reserve for bad harvests has also helped a lot. Traditionally the carying capacity is the capacity of the "bad harvest" years. Improvements in food storage has allowed us to take the surplus from good years and apply them later. Diversity of food sources has also allowed us to increase food security and overcome the fluctuations of any single resource. Again these are both tightly tied to trade and transportation.

Finally the urban environment has allowed the concentration of humans at higher density, with the people living highly concentrated. This allows more land to be devoted to agricultural prodcution than if the poplulation was spread out more evenly.

Answer 4

The CC of the earth in modern time, to a bunch of vegans is about 22 billion, or only about 2.2 billion meat eating Americans(the rule of 10). That said, the current CC of the earth has been artifically streached for the time being, i.e. take away modern meds, industrial ag, and their cummfy warm living rooms; Then about 4.5 billion people will drop dead soon afterwards.

Answer 5

We have industrialized our system of agriculture. That allowed us to produce far more food than we could each gather on our own. We also have ways of disposing of waste that allow more people to live in a small area.

Answer 6

This is cheating, and violates your YA terms of service. This question has been reported to Yahoo as a violation.

Answer 7

Agriculture, agriculture, agriculture. It's all about agriculture. That's it. Agriculture.

Any other factors would be the advances which improve agriculture.