Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cultural Carrying Capacity: A Biological Approach to Human Problems.

1992; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

Garrett Hardin,

Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies

The conflict that emerged between biologists and theologians by the mid 19th resulted in the 1925 Dayton Tennessee Scopes trial that was claimed to be a moral victory for the evolutionists. The biologist and evoluntionist H.J. Muller noted in 1959 that the subject of evolution was almost entirely missing from high school biology textbooks after a century of neglect of public education. The management of herds both wild and domesticated rests on the concept of carrying capacity. In 1944 some 2 dozen reindeer were released on St. Matthew Island Alaska where previously there had been none. Lichens were plentiful and the animals increased at an average rate of 32%/per year for the next 19 years reaching a peak of about 6000 in the year 1963. During the heavy snows of 1963-64 almost all of the animals perished from starvation caused by overgrazing leaving as herd of 41 females and 1 male. Whenever a population grows beyond the carrying capacity the environment is rapidly degraded and carrying capacity is reduced in subsequent years. The population continues to grow uncontrolled temporarily as the carrying capacity grows smaller. For human populations Malthuss theory sets a point of inevitable war havoc and famine: the carrying capacity of the environment and the food supply. However the spectacular development of technology in the years after 1798 moved the set point steadily upward. Currently the threat is posed by cultural capacity becoming so seriously transgressed as to preclude effective inventiveness. The consequence is that the standard of living degenerates into mere existence without inventiveness. Overpopulation can be corrected by means of attrition assuring that the birth rate falls below the death rate. In the Western world the adjustment of population to reality requires reexamining and substantially modifying the concept of human rights with a focus on the concept of cultural carrying capacity.