Word: malthusian
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...down. Estimates vary, but a figure of roughly 6 million people on Earth at the beginning of agriculture is reasonable. By 1798 the population reached 900 million. Agriculture altered how we related to the natural world and, in liberating us from the confines of the local ecosystem, removed the Malthusian lid in one fell swoop...
...young age at which mothers have their children, telescoping the time between generations. Such factors mean the human explosion won't just end with industrialization. And unless education, cultural changes and family planning can radically reduce fertility rates, economists may soon need to dust off their copies of the Malthusian Doctrine...
During the 1970s, gloom spread, partly as a result of the energy crisis, and growth was demonized. At the end of Jimmy Carter's presidential term a group of federal agencies submitted Global 2000 Report to the President. It was strongly neo-Malthusian, predicting environmental degradation, overpopulation, shrinking resources and vast increases in poverty unless there were technological breakthroughs and international action. The Carter Administration passed the report on to Ronald Reagan, who ignored it. The doomsayers could not have foreseen the collapse of the Soviet Union, the retreat of the welfare state in most parts of the world...
...York, Massachusetts and other states are clamoring for electric vehicles too. Japanese and European automakers are launching their own futuristic prototypes. Can it be that a revolution in global transportation is finally at hand? Clean eco-cars that will save smoggy cities--indeed, the greenhouse-gassed planet--from the Malthusian explosion of internal-combustion engines...
...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...