Word: malthus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...theories of Malthus and Darwin, he said, gave man the idea that he was reproducing himself faster than technology could raise production, and that life was a matter of the "survival of the fittest" a "you-or-me" question. The fundamental mandate of political leaders was to assure that "it wasn't their country that went down." Wars became the order...
Ever since the time of Malthus (1766-1834), prophets of doom have warned that if the human race does not stop reproducing so fast it will eventually outbreed its available food supply. But whenever the pessimists of the plundered-planet school have set a date for this unhappy event, they were proved to be wrong. In advanced countries the technology of food production has kept well ahead of population growth (TIME, Nov. 8, 1948). The U.S., with its burdensome crop surplus, is farther from starvation than ever before, and other countries are in the same condition. Only technologically backward countries...
Karlinsky is brooding about world population. He has just heard of the theories of Malthus and has read somewhere that, at a certain stage of development, the human embryo has gills like a fish. With these things in mind, he thinks: "Why should the country waste its potential fish reserves? In the Splendid Future, the fishlike embryo would be turned to good account. Carefully extracted from the womb, they would be conditioned to a separate existence in pools set aside especially for them. There they would grow scales and fins under the supervision of the State. And next door...
...point of historical interest that concern over what we now call the "population explosion" did not begin with Malthus. Tertullian, writing about the year 200 A.D., referred to "the teeming population of the earth" and to "complaints that nature no longer suffices to supply our needs." Tertullian's view that "pestilence, famine, war and earthquakes must be regarded as a remedy for this condition, a pruning, as it were, of the too fruitful human race" was a commonplace in the ancient world, but will hardly commend itself, morally or scientifically, to population experts today...
Sunlight & Sea Water. Today, as in Malthus' time, the world has vast amounts of empty space left-particularly in Australia, Africa and Latin America (where the rate of population growth is even higher than in Asia). Brazil's vast Amazon basin, amounting to nearly one-twentieth of the land surface of the earth, is still virgin soil. In Ethiopia alone, more than 180 million of the world's most fertile acres lie fallow. Even in crowded Asia, great tracts of potentially arable land, such as the Philippine island of Mindanao and the central highlands of South Viet...