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On the planetary capacity to sustain human populations

机译：关于维持人类人口的星球能力

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ABSTRACT: This essay investigates the limiting capacity of the planet to support humans, making various assumptions about current practices and the intensities of per caput resource consumption. Supposing people to be exclusively vegetarian, consuming cereals produced by present methods, at the highest reported yields, and also eschewing the cultivation of non-edible crops, the Earth is argued to be capable of sustaining a population up to 55 billion. Consuming mixed diets including meat and beverages while continuing to raise non-food crops reduces the capacity by 7- to 10-fold, closer to the actual population at the present time. When the availability and distribution of exploitable water supplies are considered, it is difficult to argue for a sustainable population much exceeding 10 billion, without considerable changes in the equity of supply. All such extrapolations are subject to unknown consequences of rapid and chaotic climate change. The possibility that the rate of human population growth may be stabilising for other reasons, with numbers perhaps peaking at 10 to 11 billion, may yet allow increasingly widespread and severe water shortages to be avoided. This coincidence offers the opportunity to improve human sustainability through new social structures and new, cleaner, more resource-efficient technologies. They need to be directed towards solving inequities in resource use—not only of food and energy, but especially also of water. Though ultimately speculative and polemical, the essay is a genuine attempt to promote the case for recognising our real problems and the need to evolve strategies for survival.
机译：摘要：本文研究了地球支持人类的极限能力，并对当前的做法和人均资源消耗的强度做出了各种假设。假设人们完全是素食主义者，以现有方法生产的谷物消费，其报告的单产最高，并且避免种植非食用作物，据称地球能够维持多达550亿的人口。在继续种植非粮食作物的同时食用包括肉类和饮料在内的混合饮食会使能力降低7到10倍，接近目前的实际人口。如果考虑到可利用的水的供应和分配，就很难为可持续人口超过100亿而又不对供水公平性做出重大改变的主张。所有这些外推法都会遭受迅速而混乱的气候变化的未知后果。人口增长率可能由于其他原因而趋于稳定的可能性（这一数字可能达到10至110亿的峰值），仍可能避免越来越普遍和严重的水短缺。这种巧合提供了通过新的社会结构和新的，更清洁的，更节省资源的技术来改善人类可持续性的机会。他们需要直接致力于解决资源使用中的不平等现象，不仅是粮食和能源，尤其是水。尽管最终是推测性的和辩论性的，但这篇文章是一次真正的尝试，目的是促进人们认识到我们的真正问题以及制定生存策略的必要性。

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