A major question confronting sustainability research today is to what extent our planet, with a finite environmental resource base, can accommodate the faster than exponentially growing human population. Although these concerns are generally attributed to Malthus (1766–1834), early attempts to estimate the maximum sustainable population (ergo, the carrying capacity K) were reported by van Leeuw...

3 "I believe that what may be called classic social analysis is a definable and usable set of traditions; that its essential feature is the concern with historical social structures; and that its problems are of direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human troubles. "-C. Wright Mills (1959) 4 Acknowledgments I wish to thank my colleagues, particularly Drs. David Newcomb and Lill...

WITH BIRTH RATES FALLING, the last gasp of the population explosion may add as few as 2 billion more people to the world's population. Eight billion is the UN's peak population figure, attained by 2050, in the low/medium scenario of its 1996 projection series. (The medium trajectory plateaus at around 10.5 billion later in the century.) If 2 billion is all, however, most of them will come in th...