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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: coug who wrote (80868)	6/4/2010 12:07:44 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

William Catton's landmark book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change was published in 1980. The premise of his thesis is that any species - including man - can be too successful in exploiting ecological niches and their accompanying resources. As an explanation, David Delaney describes a 3-phase process in Overshoot in a Nutshell: The creation of stocks is due to ongoing geological and biological activity. A resource stock forms when a part of the daily production of a resource, a flow, accumulates slowly without being exploited, perhaps over millions of years. An enormous stock of a resource may accumulate before it encounters a species that can exploit it easily. After such an encounter, only predation and disease limit reproduction of the species. Without significant predation or disease, and while large amounts of the stock remain easily available, the population of a species can grow to a size hundreds of times that which can be supported by the flows that created the stock. The daily production of a resource is a mere trickle compared to the flood available from a stored accumulation. After a long period during which more of the stock is consumed each day by the growing population than was consumed on the preceding day, the stock starts to exhaust. Deposits of the stock become harder to find. Less can be obtained from the stock each day than the day before. The time now remaining before complete exhaustion of the stock may be much shorter than the time that elapsed between encounter with the stock and the first signs of approaching scarcity. Soon, individuals begin to compete desperately for the remaining stock. To stay alive, they resort to alternative resources of lower and lower quality. By consuming the sources of flow, they destroy the capacity of their environment to produce the original flow. They also destroy the capacity of their environment to produce flows of alternative resources. Most of the population dies.