Professor Emeritus, Washington State University
William Robert Catton, Jr. is a professor emeritus at the Department of Sociology, Washington State University. He is most and fondly well-known for a now-seminal treatise on environmental carrying capacity, named Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change (1980). In that and subsequent papers, books, and other authored texts, Catton documents what he defines as the "Age of Exuberance".
1492—present, punctuated by Europe’s expansion past the European limits to growth on population, food production, and ore, fuel, and forest extraction — by {a} exporting excess Europeans to the Americas and {b} converting non-renewable fossil fuel to both food and fuel.