3. What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet Copyright 2012, The Wecskaop Project. All rights reserved. This presentation is a courtesy of The Wecskaop Project It is entirely free for use by scientists, students, and educators anywhere in the world.

4. Part One Carrying Capacity

5. How many individuals can a particular ecosystem [or planet] indefinitely support over a long period of time while continuing to function and without suffering severe or irreparable damage?

6. For scientists, the answer to such a question constitutes the system's carrying capacity How many individuals can a particular ecosystem [or planet] indefinitely support over a long period of time while continuing to function and without suffering severe or irreparable damage?

7. Since ecosystems are finite in their size and resources, each has an upper limit to the population that it can support while continuing to and also provide the assorted ecological services that allow a given population to exist  provide food  resources  withstand impacts and damage  tolerate or withstand wastes  maintain, perpetuate, and repair itself Phytoplankton in the oceans, such as these diatoms, produce more than half of the oxygen that we breathe So wisdom recommends protecting them and doing them no harm

8. Since ecosystems are finite in their size and resources, each has an upper limit to the population that it can support while continuing to and also provide the assorted ecological services that allow a given population to exist  provide food  resources  withstand impacts and damage  tolerate or withstand wastes  maintain, perpetuate, and repair itself

9. Examples of crucial ecological services include each day’s production and replacement of most of the molecular O 2 that we and most other animals con- sume every few seconds The fifty species of diatoms in the image above, for instance, are examples of phytoplankton in the earth’s oceans that produce more than half of the oxygen that we breathe What happens if we destroy them or diminish their numbers or weaken their ability to function?

10. Pollination of vast percentages of flowering plants everywhere, and dramatic contributions to the production of rainfall by the process of transpiration. Other ecological services include, for instance, What happens if we destroy them or diminish their numbers ?

11. Environmental carrying capacities need not necessarily involve food and water, but can also reflect critical limits to the damages, wastes, eradications, and impacts that they can safely withstand – and to their capabilities for self-perpetuation, maintenance, and self-repair

13. Imagine an elevator, for example, that can safely accommodate 18 passengers and yet 83 or 247 or 1058 passengers begin to squeeze aboard

14. It is easy to understand that the stresses of excessive loading virtually ensure failures in one or more components, triggering the collapse of the entire system and the destruction of both the vehicle and its passengers Notice that this is quite different than Malthus’s assessments involving food; So that the science and understandings today are far broader

15. A similar unsettling scenario can be envisioned if one imagines an aircraft of finite size, only to notice that a line of more and more and more persons continue to endlessly board the aircraft

16. It is thus important to appreciate that carrying capacity in biological and biospheric systems is commonly far MORE than simply a matter of food, or water, or “resources”

17. Thus, more and more persons endlessly boarding an elevator or aircraft or vehicle or planet of finite capacity constitutes a most unwise behavior

18. A behavior that invites transgressions of at least one or more and/or

19. Thousands of examples of thresholds, limits, and tipping points (both known and unknown) exist in real-world natural and biospheric systems

20. As two quick examples of thresholds in real-world systems: One instance in a biological system can be seen in human blood which has buffers that maintain its pH at a mildly alkaline 7.4 level. Seemingly small transgressions, how- ever, beyond pH 7.3 (lower limit) or 7.5 (upper limit) result in acidosis or alkalosis, both of which are potentially fatal.

27. All three classical examples experienced 99%-plus die-offs and collapse at a time when the combined bodies or cells of each of the populations physically-occupied roughly 2/1000ths of 1% of their surrounding environment that appeared to remain theoretically-available to them

39. Not a very wise policy, was it?

68. Also notice that this graph of human population growth over the past 10,000 years is an extreme J-curve

69. How worrying should J-curves be? Unfortunately, humankind first learned with horror what J-curves can do from unspeakably deadly events at the close of World War II

70. Physicists know that exponential progressions and their resulting graphs which are known as J-curves exhibit a decided tendency to obliterate everything around themselves in every direction A graph of this shape on the display monitors of a nuclear power plant would send the plant’s engineers scrambling for the exits