Analyzing ecological footprints reveals that a. Earth's carrying capacity would increase if per capita meat consumption increased. b. current demand by industrialized countries for resources is much smaller than the ecological footprint of those countries. c. it is not possible for technological improvements to increase Earth's carrying capacity for humans. d. the ecological footprint of the United States is large because per capita resource use is high.

Question

Accepted Answer

Welcome back. Let's look at our next problem. It says ecological footprint is defined as well. It's your call for more content videos we think of ecological footprint. When you think of a footprint, you think of sort of the mark, something makes on something. It's an area of space. And the notion of ecological footprint um is a concept that compares the level of consumption of given population with the available amount of bio productive land and sea area to generate a theoretical sustainability threshold. Kind of looking at what's the amount of bio productive land and sea area that's needed to sustain a given population at its current level of consumption kind of as a warning indicator of its if this sustainability threshold will be exceeded. Um So when we look through our answer choices, we see that choice A says an indicator that accounts for human demand on global biological resources. And this is the definition of ecological footprint. But let's look through our other answer choices just to make sure choice B says the amount of food needed to sustain a population. Well this is part of ecological footprint. Um We are looking at what is needed to sustain but we're looking at all the things needed to sustain the population, so not just food, food, water, natural resources, area for shelter and other needs. So that's not a sufficient uh the definition or description of ecological footprint. That's the same with choice. See the amount of natural environment needed by a population. Uh Natural environment is just one little part of what goes into ecological footprint. So that's not our inter choice there. And then obviously D all of the above is not correct. Then, so again, ecological footprint is defined as choice, an indicator that accounts for human demand on global biological resources. See you in the next video.

Verified Solution

Key Concepts

Ecological Footprint

Carrying Capacity

Resource Consumption