Honestly, what self-respecting American doesn't know classic Lynard Skynard?

"Saturday Night Special" is a song from... 1976 I think. It's all about the pointlessness of handguns, especially cheap "Saturday night Specials" and how we should dump them all £to the bottom of the sea". Fast forward 35 years and the same band are singing about how you have to lock your door at night and put your faith in your "peacemaker".

Basically, this is the degeneration of American society as demonstrated through music.

You're leaning on "increased carrying capacity" and technology to allow for continued population expansion in developed societies without considering the full implications. This increased carry capacity is achieved through the use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers spread over vast fields, often separated by electric fences as opposed to hedges to achieve high yields of the same crop year after year.

The pesticides lower biodiversity whilst the fast-growing crops and chemical fertilisers leach nutrients from the soil and starve bacteria that allows it to regenerate. Runoff from the fields pollutes rivers, killing fish and small mammals, the lack of hedges further harms insect and bird populations whilst mono-cropping ultimately destroys the topsoil.

This phenomenon is what causes dust bowls in the US and mass "colony collapse" among bees, among other ecological disasters.

This is not just a problem in the US, of course, but also in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/environm...s-michael-gove

https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/art...l-degradation/

So, no, we cannot keep increasing "carrying capacity", we are vastly over capacity and are essentially leaching from the land to sustain ourselves. Modern farms are doing the same damage to the environment as Roman Latifundia two millennia ago.

As regards a Zombie apocalypse - I think this discussion demonstrates that people would spend far too long pretending we could "fix" the problem before confronting it. For example, we would insist on trying to develop a vaccine or even a cure instead of shooting all infected at the moment of infection and burning all corpses.