How Many People Can the Earth Support?
Edition: Paperback
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Number of pages: 532
Subjects: Population; Environment; Carrying capacity
Genres: Non-fiction; World Affairs; Population
First sentence: "Shortly before 1600 B.C., a junior scribe in what is now Iraq transcribed on three clay tablets a Babylonian history of humankind."
Description: This book's seventeen chapters offer readers an overview of humanity's demographic past, present, and near term population futures, with special attention paid to the challenges and implications that our current trajectories pose.  Excerpt:  "...the size and speed of growth of the human population today have no precedents in all the Earth's history before the last half of the twentieth century..."  --  "...today's rapid relative and absolute increase in population stretches the productive, absorptive, and recuperative capacities of the Earth...."
Table of contents: value: Between Choices and Constraints; value: Four Evolutions of Population Growth; value: People Control the Growth of Nonhuman Populations; value: People Control the Growth of Human Populations; value: Human Population History in Numbers and Graphs; value: The Uniqueness of the Present Relative to the Past; value: Projection Methods:  The Hazy Crystal Ball; value: Scenarios of Future Populations; value: What Do We Know for Surve about the Future of Global Population?