In the second of Road’s main innovations, Vogt summed up the relationship between humanity and this global environment with a single concept: carrying capacity. It is hard to overstate the importance of this. There are two ideas at the base of today’s globe-spanning environmental movement. One is that Homo sapiens, like every other species, is bound by biological laws. The second is that one of these laws is that no species can long exceed the environment’s carrying capacity.
