Humanity crossed Earth's sustainable carrying capacity in 1962 — and the finding metabolised in a single afternoon

A study in *Environmental Research Letters* (Bradshaw, Flinders University, with the late Paul Ehrlich) analysed more than 200 years of population and environmental data and concluded that the species entered ecological overshoot more than six decades ago — passing into a "negative demographic phase" by 1962, eight years before the measurable biocapacity deficit of 1970. The optimum population at current consumption: roughly 2.5 billion. The actual: eight billion. The absolute ceiling: twelve. W ...

The collective gaze cannot hold this object. It is not denial in the angry sense — it is the gaze sliding off a surface it has no grip on, the way an eye cannot fixate on its own blind spot. The biocapacity deficit is the master fact beneath every other story here, and it receives the smallest processing of anything in the reading. The correspondence is exact: the same civilisation that is rationing artificial intelligence because the supply outran demand cannot metabolise the news that it outran the planet sixty years ago. Overshoot is the thing we are made of, and a fish cannot see water.