Carrying Capacity and Thrivability

How do we navigate for a more thrivable world? How can we see if we are there? One way to think about that is to find the thresholds for aliveness that we want to hold to. What is the carrying capacity that creates aliveness for me as a person? What carrying capacity do my relationships hold? Our organizations? Our systems?

The Covid Pandemic put a certain type of graph front and center, taking over the visual field usually composed of hockey stick growth. Suddenly, everyone was talking about collectively staying within the lines of hospital carrying capacity. There became a sort of recognition that the health system could manage a certain amount of hospital visits, but that very quickly the capacity to address intensive care needs and particularly the equipment needs for intubation and ventilators would hit a threshold where anyone who needed them, covid or not, wouldn’t get them. There would not be enough beds, doctors, nurses, and tools to care for the sick. And the early warning signs that the carrying capacity had been exceeded was the ugly triage strategies: who gets access first and who is left to die. Triage is of course not new. 

Given our environmental and social issues, we might want to explore where else we are at, or have exceeded, our carrying capacity and have shifted to triage. 

And also, for the super creative, consider what factors figure into the shape of carrying capacity? Might it be expanded and extended?

https://thrivable.decko.org/Carrying_Capacity

This concept enables us to take into consideration the biological or organic limits of a given system.

Carrying capacity in general focuses on how much can be held by a container. In an environmental sense, it is how much life can be held in a given container such as a specific ecosystem. Carrying capacity answers the question of what the biological limits might be. Carrying capacity takes into account what flows in, such as birth rate, what flows out, such as rate of death, and various limits to life such as access to water and rate of consumption and recycling of water.

More broadly speaking, carrying capacity points to a relatively stable state of dynamic equilibrium. 

We can often be seduced by growth graphs that have the familiar hockey-stick pattern. These do not account for carrying capacity and the metastable states. Look for where the curve is really an S-curve. Carrying capacity enables us to ask what can increase capacity rather than assuming it is a fixed boundary.