Can the earth handle 6 billion people?
The Earth can handle 6,000,000 people fairly easily but at some sacrifice of other species. The problem is not the earth it is the politicians and the urge to have and consume more by the people. A lot of this consumption is wasteful and done mostly to show off. (a great economist, Thorstein Veblen, worked on this in a book called, The THeory of the Leisure CLass where he proposed the idea of conspicuous consumption.) RIght now, and this has been true for years, there is plenty of food, water, space for everybody. The problem is not the lack, it is the distribution of the food, water and the people. There are good reasons for population concentrations and specialization in work and farming. It allows better use of resources. But it takes a great deal of coordination. What the world can not support is 6,000,000 living as hunter gatherers, or individual subsistence farmers. It has to work with modern methods and a longer view of how to distribute what is needed and drop a lot of what is
