Stewards and Balancers
Respecting Nature’s Limits Is the Solution
by Aaron Guthrie Lehmer-Chang
Last month, The New York Times published a fantastical piece on human exceptionalism entitled “Overpopulation Is Not the Problem,†in which author Erle C. Ellis claimed that human societies have no limits to their growth. That’s right — limits are merely an illusion. Expansion über alles! That’s our species’ birthright, and rightful destiny.
“There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity,†writes Ellis, castigating those of us concerned with ecological limits as believers that humans are little different than “bacteria in a petri dish.†Perhaps even more outlandishly, Ellis goes on to state that “[t]he idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future.†Who’s history exactly?
As an associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Ellis should know better. Unless he steered clear of the stacks of thoughtful volumes available to him on the rise and fall of past civilizations, he would surely have encountered chronicle after chronicle of societies that faced progressively daunting ecological challenges, and which plummeted in population as a result. (more…)