**4. Collective response to carrying capacity deficit**

Earth has just added a seven-billionth person to its contemporary human population-load as I write this, a mere dozen years after this finite planet reached the six billion mark! Moreover, much of that enormous population has been living prodigally by lavish use of non-renewable resources. In the aftermath of "the" industrial revolution, adopting internal combustion engines for the accomplishment of many human tasks had made "developed" societies increasingly dependent upon Earth's inevitably dwindling stocks of crude oil. Since Earth's finite deposits of this fundamentally non-renewable natural resource were destined to become scarcer and scarcer as a result of rapid use, modern lifestyles, present or aspired to, were thus inherently self-destructive. A crescendo of difficult circumstances that will confront human societies has been forecast by a growing number of ecologically informed writers (Udall, 1980; Youngquist, 1997; Greer, 2011).

This developing predicament cannot be wished away, but many sociologists have disregarded its relevance to their discipline's concerns. However, at least collective behavior

But today again we live in a troubled time, in various ways reminiscent of those 1930s. Erosion of optimism today has deeper ecological roots than sociologists have been inclined to consider. The lack of vital ecological insights, both among the public (and their elected representatives in government) and among most sociologists is proving tragic. Principles of ecology as developed in the biological sciences suggest that this twenty-first century will most probably be seen in retrospect as "the bottleneck century." Human societies will have had to pass through a period of monumental hazards, resource insufficiencies, hostile interactions, and inequitably distributed hardships. Human numbers will have ceased growing; in many parts of the world, population will have actually declined. Standards of

Sociological attempts to explain these conditions and calamities will be constricted by lack of ecological understanding. Sociological predictions will likely founder in misconception of our true ecological condition, misconceptions enabled by our anthropocentric restriction of

Public recognition of, and adequate adaptation to, the deteriorating ecological context of human life has been impeded by conventional preoccupations. Short-term concerns tend to blind people at all societal levels to omens of a fundamentally altered future. To elude such preoccupations, sociologists must at last abandon the notion that "human ecology" is only a minor subdiscipline of sociology, of marginal relevance to "the big issues." That is a notion prevalent since "the Chicago School" of sociologists early in the 20th century imported into the sociological vocabulary a few ecological terms and applied them principally to the study

Certain crucial ambiguities in pioneer writings about the sociological applicability of ecological principles had enabled derailment of recognition that humans are inextricably involved along with other species in ecosystem patterns and principles. This necessary understanding was lost in treatment of human ecology as *merely analogous* to bio-ecology

Earth has just added a seven-billionth person to its contemporary human population-load as I write this, a mere dozen years after this finite planet reached the six billion mark! Moreover, much of that enormous population has been living prodigally by lavish use of non-renewable resources. In the aftermath of "the" industrial revolution, adopting internal combustion engines for the accomplishment of many human tasks had made "developed" societies increasingly dependent upon Earth's inevitably dwindling stocks of crude oil. Since Earth's finite deposits of this fundamentally non-renewable natural resource were destined to become scarcer and scarcer as a result of rapid use, modern lifestyles, present or aspired to, were thus inherently self-destructive. A crescendo of difficult circumstances that will confront human societies has been forecast by a growing number of ecologically

This developing predicament cannot be wished away, but many sociologists have disregarded its relevance to their discipline's concerns. However, at least collective behavior

**3. The new challenge** 

living will have fallen.

of *urban* life.

(Catton 1992).

the scope of "human ecology" (Freese, 1997).

**4. Collective response to carrying capacity deficit** 

informed writers (Udall, 1980; Youngquist, 1997; Greer, 2011).

theory in sociology (Turner, 1964) has developed enough research-supported insights to shed important light on the ways people, organizations and societies can be expected to respond to such circumstances. Such light may be as unwelcome as is the changed state of the world it reveals. Even if the facts made evident are unwelcome, sociologists are obliged to face and clarify them.

In coming decades, because of changes to planet Earth wrought by human activities since the industrial revolution, mankind is certain to experience frustrated hopes, declining material wealth, deteriorating quality of life in befouled and ravaged environments on every continent. Intensified worldwide competition for diminishing natural resources has become inevitable, as have mounting pressures toward social reorganization along unwelcome lines (see Brown, 1981; CEQ and Dept. of State, 1980; Hayes, 1979; Henshaw, 1971; Lerner, 1981; Peccei, 1981; Stoel, 1979). On the basis of collective behavior theory we can expect one or more of the following responses: panic, terror, genocidal wars. These are likely responses to our deepening ecological predicament. Only if accurately foreseen, may the pressures otherwise likely to induce destructive responses not have to impel people and nations to commit disastrously misguided and seriously counterproductive reactions.
