INTRODUCTION

In Chapters 2 and 3 we have explored sustainability in two industries: agriculture and fisheries. Both, of course, involved the harvesting of organisms and thus are essentially ‘biological’ industries. In this chapter we will cast the net wider and look at how biology has had an impact upon visions and practice of sustainability in industry.

The first point that needs to be made is that the central notion of ‘carrying capacity’ in biology, which was discussed in Chapter 3 with relation to MSY, can equally be applied to humans, and human population growth, and has long been seen as of critical importance to the utilisation of the planet's resources. These resources are not only used to produce food, but to enhance our quality of life. The relationship between population and sustainability is perhaps most associated with Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University zoologist. Ehrlich was one of the pioneers of planned biological control as an alternative to the use of pesticides. However, it is his writing on human populations that have received the most attention. His 1968 best-selling book The Population Bomb (1968) and the sequel in 1990 The Population Explosion (1990) along with various articles in scientific journals and the popular press raised awareness of the dangers of population growth with their graphic predictions of poverty and starvation as a result of limited resources having to be redistributed amongst more and more people.