The Genesis, History, and Limits of Carrying Capacity

The concept of carrying capacity is employed in a remarkably wide range of disciplines and debates, and it has been forcefully critiqued within numerous fields. Yet its historical origins remain obscure. I identify four major types of uses of carrying capacity: (1) as a mechanical or engineered attribute of manufactured objects or systems, beginning around 1840 in the context of international shipping; (2) as an attribute of living organisms and natural systems, beginning in the 1870s and most fully developed in range and game management early in the twentieth century; (3) as K, the intrinsic limit of population increase in organisms, used by population biologists since the mid-twentieth century; and (4) as the number of humans the earth can support, employed by neo-Malthusians, also since midcentury. All four uses persist to the present, although the first has been largely supplanted by other terms such as payload. In all cases, carrying capacity has been conceived as ideal, static, and numerical—characteristics that were appropriate in the first case but increasingly untenable as the concept was extended to systems of larger scale, greater variability, and lesser human control.