"As William R. Catton Jr. pointed out trenchantly many years ago in his book Overshoot, this is the situation the human population of Earth is in just now. The

"As William R. Catton Jr. pointed out trenchantly many years ago in his book Overshoot, this is the situation the human population of Earth is in just now. The invention of fossil fuel-powered technologies and the breakneck extraction of fossil fuels that followed provided the industrial world with a resource base equivalent to ten spare planets. That was why population figures started rising in the nineteenth century and went into overdrive in the twentieth: all those additional resources temporarily boosted the carrying capacity of the planet to levels never before reached, and allowed our species to experience an immense population boom."