ECON C175 Chapter Notes - Chapter (Week 4): Revegetation
Week 4: Edogeous Groth & Resoure
Costraits
Boserup: Environment, Population, and Technology in Primitive Societies
• Reasoning: a given environment has a certain carrying capacity for human populations, defined as the
number of persons who can be accommodated in that region under the prevailing system of
subsistence
o Suffers from two main weaknesses:
▪ Focuses exclusively on the technology of food production, ignoring the effects of
technological changes in other areas and the effects of the environment
▪ Ignores the effects of demographic change on both environment and technology; not
just food, but health, transport, and war technologies = increases mortality rates
• The number of persons who can live in a given area of land is, of course, higher the shorter the period
of fallow (allowing the environment to return to its natural state)
• A growing population that is beginning to outgrow the carrying capacity of its subsistence system is
likely to be receptive to the idea of borrowing technology from other communities with higher
population densities and with less land-using subsistence systems
o The change from the food-gathering stage to intensive preindustrial agriculture has been a
very slow process
o Transport technology can only be applied when there is a minimum population
Malakoff: Are More People Necessarily a Problem?
• Over the past 75 years, population growth in Machakos, Kenya and nearby Nairobi has triggered
social and economic shifts that have made it possible for residents to regreen once-barren hillsides,
reinvigorate failing soils, reduce birth rates, and increase crop production and incomes
• Experts warn that more people threaten to exacerbate hunger, poverty, and environmental
proles, others respod y otig that atios ith soe the orld’s highest populatio
densities—such as Singapore and the Netherlands—also hae soe of the orld’s strogest
economies and environmental commitments
• Boserup’s ork arried soe prooatie ipliatios. Oe as that uderpopulatio, ot
overpopulation, was a barrier to development
o More people had proided oth the laor ad the eessity for a trasitio to
intensification and better land stewardship
o Intensification has supported extensive population growth and ultimately urbanization, which
has led to the abandonment and revegetation of less fertile lands (a process experts call
lad release)
Hardin: The Tradgedy of the Commons
• The acquisition of energy (food) that is the problem
• Each herdsman seeks to maximize their gain without thinking of the outcome of their actions
• No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation
• The commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the
human population has increased, the commons have had to be abandoned in one aspect after
another
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