Sustainable development in relation to the carrying capacity of the biosphere

Abstract

Given our relative well-being and economic growth as well as the impressive success of scientific and technical progress of the 1960s and 1970s, why did the question of sustainable development suddenly arise? Because the most insightful scientists realized that humanity had approached a certain critical limit, encountering external boundaries in its development. Admittedly, at first, such limitations were perceived as being essentially based on natural resources—a position that predominated at the time in the Club of Rome reports. However, ecologists following the most consistent lines of reasoning concluded that such boundaries were determined not so much by subsurface resources or accessible energy sources, as they were by the biospheric potential for the neutralization of growing anthropogenic disruption. The latter is inevitably bound up with the attainment of a critical threshold where this potential is exhausted—something which we are essentially experiencing today. In light of this, the biosphere—unable to cope with anthropogenic pressure—is reaching a stage of degradation (perhaps reversible at first) that will presumably continue until its cause disappears. That cause is human civilization that has been unable to harmonize its development with the adaptive capacity of the natural environment. And all this could happen much earlier than the explosion of a real crisis related to one of our vital resources.