Word: malthus
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...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...
...Doctor's Discovery. As much as nuclear energy, the population explosion is a product of the Western scientific revolution. In 1798-the year that the Rev. Thomas Malthus "proved" that the earth's capacity to produce food was no match for man's capacity to reproduce -Britain's Dr. Edward Jenner discovered that smallpox could be prevented by vaccination, and thereby opened the road to modern medicine's many techniques of "death control." This knowledge, when transferred from the industrial nations of the West to Latin America, Africa and Asia-where a medical investment...
...only safe generalization about long-range population predictions is that they have always proved wrong. When Malthus foresaw mass starvation in Europe unless its people stopped breeding, he failed to reckon with the industrial revolution and the agricultural potential of the Americas. Latter-day players of the Malthusian numbers game, who foresee global economic ruin in one, two or six centuries, usually fail to reckon sufficiently on the unknowable potentialities of science and the unpredictable turn of events. Says the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: "With the present rate of increase, it can be calculated that...
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...
...world had better listen to Malthus and Toynbee. The main problem is not one of food. Sooner or later the world will have to face up to birth control...