The natural growth rate of populations enables them to produce more offspring that can be supported by the environment. This idea provoked Malthus (1798) to propose that there would be an inevitable crisis for human civilization given that population increases exponentially but humanity’s ability to produce food likely would only increase linearly. //

In ecology, as Cushman (2023) described, thermodynamics and entropy have been largely ignored, except for the field of macroecology (Brown, 1995) and the use of information theory, particularly in the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology (Harte and Newman, 2014).