Word: malthus
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...Sound familiar? Try this: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce sustenence for man." Not Hinrichsen in 1997, but Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798. You might remember dreary Malthusian predictions from social science class ? if so, you'll also recall he was proved wrong. Fast-forward 200 years, and a bunch of researchers are trying to recycle the warning. Has anything changed...
...pessimist to the end, Malthus neglected human ingenuity ? crop rotation and refrigerated steamships got us out of the hole well before his starvation deadline. At least Hinrichsen's doomsaying is more cautious: Technological advances could feed an extra 2 billion mouths, he admits, but would require "decades of effort at the international, national and local levels...
...embrace the principle of contraceptive discretion without entering into the Cairo debate -- Thomas Malthus vs. the More the Merrier School. Many conservatives, and such resolutely unalarmed observers of the world environment as the economist Julian Simon, see more people as the planet's greatest asset, economic and otherwise, and argue that in a free-market economy, sperm, ovaries and Adam Smith conspire to produce the best of all possible worlds. Let a billion flowers bloom. I consider this also to be a form of argumentative neurosis...
...breakthroughs to forestall the graying of the developed world; no method to recycle wealth from North to South. Global population pressures represent the strongest aspect of Kennedy's bleak portrait of life in the next century. Small wonder that he begins with a tip of the hat to Thomas Malthus' dire -- but ultimately incorrect -- late 18th century prediction of worldwide starvation. "The world's population was less than a billion when Malthus first wrote his Essay ((on Population))," Kennedy notes. "Now it is heading, at the least, toward 7 or 8 billion, perhaps to well over 10 billion." But elsewhere...
Ever since Thomas Malthus' 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population proposed that human fertility would outstrip the ability to produce enough food, human ingenuity has consistently belied such predictions. Books such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in 1968 and the Club of Rome's 1972 study The Limits to Growth raised fears that unchecked population growth might lead to mass starvation. Later in the '70s, Lester Brown of Washington's Worldwatch Institute argued that the world's farmers were already pushing the practical limits of what good land, high-yield crops, irrigation and artificial fertilizers and pesticides...