Word: malthusian
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...Toynbee suggested that faithless Western man stands a fair chance of getting his comeuppance from Russia and the East, but who knows?-maybe not. There was no such hemming and hawing from Physicist Charles Galton Darwin. The grandson of the author of The Origin of Species played the old Malthusian game in The Next Million Years, saw ahead nothing but vast increases of population and ultimate world starvation. In a worrying world, Darwin's horizon scanning seemed like a worrier's luxury...
Another familiar anti-Malthusian argument is that modern methods of birth control can keep population down to manageable levels. This is actually happening in many nations, including some of those that are best fed. Perhaps such nations as India, where humans are multiplying rapidly, can be induced to do likewise...
...United Nations, 550 scientists from 49 nations bent their heads over the problems of the old earth. They saw the present 2 billion population increased to 3 billion by the year 2000. But they were plunged in no Malthusian gloom. They could see, on the contrary, a day when the whole world would be better off. Science was the tool-but not the answer. The answer was man himself. Said The Netherlands' Dr. Egbert de Vries, expert on rural economies: "People are an asset, a natural,resource, and not a liability . . . Humanity has the right, the duty...
...Rockwell Cage, a huge, airy gym standing apart from the columned halls where man's spirit was under investigation, the scientists discussed man's material condition. In the panel on "the Problem of World Production," Fairfield (Our Plundered Planet) Osborn once more raised his familiar Malthusian bogy of ever-shrinking resources, ever-increasing population...
...demographer or biologist would deny the validity of the Malthusian Law. Malthus postulated that populations tend to increase faster than do the means of subsistence, and must be controlled by either positive checks or preventive checks. The positive checks are those which increase the death rate-famine, disease, epidemics, excessively hard labor, and war. The preventive checks are those which reduce the birth rates-celibacy, delayed marriage, "prudential restraint" in married life, and other forms of birth control. Although Malthus underestimated man's capacity to increase the means of subsistence, he did not underestimate man's capacity...