Esther Boserup
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Esther Boserup was an economist who created a theory about the interrelationship between environment, population and technology during the 1970s. Her theory suggested that there would be a zero population growth and that the carrying capacity of the environment would remain constant.
The carrying capacity is the number of people who can live within a given area over a period of time without damaging the area, which they are living in. If there is an increase in technology the carrying capacity will increase but there will not be any new land as the population growing to the new level will use up the new space or people will migrate to the new area. However, this theory ignores the eventuality that technology will create effects upon the environment and demographic effects upon technology.
The increase in population will result to greater impacts on the environment, as there will be shorter time of fallow land in order to produce food for the growing population. Here is a list describing the lengths of fallow land:
- Gathering of food – no cultivation, all land “fallow land”
- Forest fallow – one to two crops, followed by 15-25 years of fallow
- Bush fallow – four or six crops, followed by 8-10 years of fallow
- Short fallow – one or two crops, followed by one year of fallow
- Annual cropping – one crop each year with few month of fallow
- Multi-cropping – two to three crops each year without any fallow
The European population began by being hunter-gatherer communities. At around 4500 B.C. some began to use forest fallow. The amount of fallow time gradually grew less and less over the centuries until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when annual cropping became universal. These shorter periods of fallow land led to changes to the environment, the forest thinned out, the soil conditions changed and there were new technologies to work the land with.
she crazy The change from food gathering to mass commercial agricultural production was not a fast process. It took from pre 4500 B.C. to the 19th century. As food production increased birth and mortality rates grew. Several other factors also created more efficient methods of food gathering; they included better transport so that they could get more food out of each agricultural section. New chemicals were also introduced to create food that didn’t spoil as quick and chemicals that would neutralise infections that would destroy whole crop cycles. With these harvest failures not as much of a threat due to pesticides, demographic catastrophes would not occur as frequency as they used to.
Esther Boserup’s theory, which stipulates that primitive societies had a zero population growth and that only improvements in food technology would result in a population increase, is theoretical. There are many factors, which contribute to the growth of any given population, which Esther Boserup failed to cover but her theory still remains logical even at our day and age.
