Can Earth's and Society's Systems Meet the Needs of 10 Billion People? Summary of a Workshop (2014) / Chapter Skim
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2 The Human-Earth System
2 The Human-Earth System
Pages 15-24
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From page 15... ...
White Professor of Environment and Society, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University B.L. Turner II began his presentation by explaining that he would address the history of how population and carrying capacity have been applied to impacts on the Earth system and human well-being.
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Thomas Malthus postulated that population growth, when un checked, will surpass the food ceiling and generate a negative impact on the human-environment relationship, i.e., demand leads to crisis (Malthus, 1798)
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He pointed out that the more the environment is manipulated or constructed by people, the more difficult it becomes to apply the concept of carrying capacity because technology and management are important determinants of sustainable production. It is possible that carrying capacity might be applicable at the global level; hypothetically, the Earth system could be treated as a "closed" human-environment system with the single exogenous input of incoming solar radiation.
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From page 18... ...
Understanding agricultural change sufficiently to predict outcomes, however, has proven difficult because human-environment systems operate as complex adaptive systems. Turner then turned to a comparison of the Cassandra and Cornucopian viewpoints of population and environment as world views linked to Malthus and Boserup.
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Turner argued that over the long term and at the global scale, resource use and environmental change correlate with the PAT variables more than any others; he said that few people question the use of IPAT as an identity. It is often used to infer causation, however, and this use is hotly debated and criticized as being too superficial, diverting attention from deeper causes of the observed correlations.
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EARTH AS A SYSTEM William Rouse Alexander Crombie Humphreys Chair in Economics of Engineering, School of Systems and Enterprises, Stevens Institute of Technology William Rouse began by explaining that he approaches the sustainability question from an engineering perspective, and he seeks to understand the effect of population on the Earth using systems engineering principles. He said his workshop presentation goals were to better understand the impact of the human population on the Earth and how population interacts with other attributes of the Earth, and he posed four questions to participants: 1.
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From page 21... ...
Rouse stated that the Earth is a single self-regulating system that exhibits multiscale temporal and spatial variation.2 He pointed out that human activities are influencing the Earth's environment in a manner equivalent to the greatest forces of nature. He stated that there are cascading effects throughout the system, and system dynamics are characterized by critical thresholds and abrupt changes.
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Bitmapped that technology could exacerbate the effects. Clean technologies lower byproduct rates but tend to increase overall use, for instance.
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Rouse identified three elements that he said are necessary to move forward: 1. Information sharing: Broadly sharing credible information helps all stakeholders understand the situation.
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From page 24... ...
Turner postulated that it may be important to understand the structure and function of tipping points and planetary boundaries and to have a measure of a tipping point time scale. Robert Hauser (National Research Council)
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