**5. The situation confronting humanity**

Humanity's ecological situation can be succinctly described as follows: Earth, the solar system's third planet from the sun, is the sole dwelling place for our species, and functions both as the source of material supplies required for whatever we do and as the repository for noxious and/or toxic by-products of our activities, as well as the arena in which we live and act.. Seven billion of us residing on this planet, many living with the aid of potent technology, are an enormous ecological load. The load imposed upon Earth's ecosystems has grown so large that the three functions of environment—"supply depot," "activity space," and "disposal site" —increasingly encroach upon one another. Recognition of that should become an essential part of modern sociology's working paradigm.

Human demands have grown to exceed sustainable yields from four indispensable biological systems: forests, cropland, grazing lands, and fisheries (Brown, 1981; Catton, 1980; Webb and Jacobsen, 1982). Not only for this reason, but also because the most technologically advanced peoples have committed themselves to largely disregarding the distinction between renewable and nonrenewable resources, we are courting disaster. A nonrenewable resource is anything we use in any of our activities that doesn't grow like a crop―so that it only gets replenished at rates that are enormously slower than our human ability to use it up. Substances that are resupplied only by slow geological processes (minerals, fossil fuels) cannot perpetually be obtained for human use in escalating (or even in constantly large) annual amounts. Any society's reliance upon drawing down finite and diminishing stocks of nonrenewable resources means present human wants can be satisfied only by depriving posterity of those resources.

These statements may not have been regarded as "principles of sociology" but that neither falsifies them nor makes them sociologically irrelevant. Because what we use up our descendants will lack, we are stealing from posterity. Both theft of any sort, and intergenerational relations, are legitimate sociological topics.

Sociology's Neglect of Ecological Context 169

Middle-class people in North America, having little or no warning by sociologists, went on escalating their energy consumption. This, together with political tensions in a part of the world from which we were increasingly obtaining an indispensable portion of the fuel we consumed, made scarcity "real" at last. To our astonishment we found that our own daily lives were affected by geophysical facts and far-away turmoil (Peachy and Lerner, 1981:

Much public discussion of current troubles seems persistently oblivious of this finite planet's ecological constraints. Familiarity with the ecological concept of carrying capacity remains rare. Therefore people at large, and sociologists to a shocking degree, do not yet comprehend the full range of social, political, and economic implications of our transition

Carrying capacity is a term denoting the amount of use of a particular kind that an environment can endure more or less perpetually without impairment of its suitability for that use (Catton, 1983). Any user population, animal or human, imposes a load upon the environment that supports it. Loads may temporarily exceed carrying capacities, but when they do, environmental degradation *from overuse* has to undermine carrying capacity, and this leads sooner or later to some form of load reduction—either a reduced number of users or reduced per capita intensity of their use of the environment. These points are true even

For several centuries after Europeans got over supposing the world was flat, and began to discover land masses in another hemisphere, the New World's existence (and its "newness") powerfully shaped history and human expectations. An unanticipated abundance of resources invited exploitation. Although the term "carrying capacity" had not yet been coined, the thrust of history in those centuries was predicated upon what seemed a vast carrying capacity surplus. Eventually there was an industrial revolution―which hastened conversion of carrying capacity surplus into carrying capacity deficit, while *seeming* to

Mankind must now struggle to come to terms with an unfamiliar situation―the replacement of a marvelous but temporary carrying capacity surplus by a deepening carrying capacity deficit. The deficit has resulted from exponential human load expansion during the past several centuries, due both to population increase and technological progress. Human societies have been undergoing great change in recent decades. Sociologists attempting to describe and explain contemporary social change (Nordskog 1960; Etzioni and Etzioni 1964; Noble 2000) have largely neglected the influence of a possible transition from carrying capacity surplus to deficit. These concepts have been deemed "not social" and thus outside the domain of sociological thought. Their exclusion from a conventional sociological

Sociologists who want to clarify and explain future social actions must acknowledge three converging trends that have put humankind in much deeper peril than is generally understood. First, there are many more humans inhabiting this planet than it can sustain. Second, technological advances of recent centuries have made gigantic and prodigal the per capita resource appetites of people and their per capita environmental impacts. Third, even though, as the symbol-using species, humans conceivably could do better at anticipating future circumstances and planning ahead, the general evolutionary heritage of *Homo sapiens*

from a condition of carrying capacity surplus to carrying capacity deficit.

when the environment in question is an entire planet.

vocabulary, however, does not diminish their effect.

454).

magnify abundance.

Natural systems have limits of tolerance that produce a bundle of interacting constraints on human action. Most sociologists have been as reluctant as people in other walks of life to confront this fact. These constraining influences from nature's systems are pressing people and nations toward zero-sum competition. Over the past century, we humans have brought upon ourselves an era of carrying capacity deficit. Collective behavior theory achieved by sociological studies has advanced enough to show us the social dilemmas and structurally conducive conditions for targeted hostility we can expect in such circumstances. After centuries of economic and social development which we regarded as progress, mankind now faces sharp reversal, making revolutions likely within nations, and wars over access to scarce resources likely between nations. People have been slow to recognize the vulnerability of ecosystems and the seriousness of pressures that overload them, but such awareness may be an essential basis for a critical ability needed to protect us from panic and from resort to catastrophic violence.

Our societies have already inflicted by customary collective activities significant changes to the physical and biological world upon which human lives and activities depend. These have rendered continuation of present patterns of sociocultural allocation of valued goods impossible. Distribution norms that were long taken as normal will inevitably be challenged. Sociologists should ask, among other things, whether such challenges are likely to involve violence. With what consequences?

Distribution standards that were formerly workable and prevalent but are becoming increasingly infeasible and obsolescent will continue to have their adherents. Cultural lags (Ogburn 1922) may be expected, so outmoded standards will continue to express themselves in unrealistic expectations. This will multiply tensions and value conflicts between social classes, or between other distinguishable identity groups—and between the living and the unborn. Indeed, some of the tension and violence occurring within the most recent half century or so should not have surprised us. It has been known for some time that future resource shortages would occur. As early as the first decade of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt warned of the need for conserving natural resources, and nearly five decades later in 1952, President Truman's Materials Policy Commission, headed by William S. Paley, acknowledged that the United States had a "Gargantuan . . . insatiable" appetite for materials, so even that long ago there was scarcely a metal or mineral fuel for which the quantity Americans had used since the beginning of World War I had not already exceeded the total previous cumulative use by all nations (Wyant, 1982: 368-369). Ever since Western societies began to industrialize and became increasingly dependent upon using nonrenewable resources, eventual scarcity has been our destiny.
