Word: malthusianism
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Congratulations on an excellent expose ol the fallacies in the Neo-Malthusian school of economists' argument in reference to population and food supply [TIME, Nov. 8] Those chappies are long on theory and dialectic, short on soil science...
Alas, the Eskimo Curlew. Most extreme of the Neo-Malthusian scare books is Vogt's Road to Survival. Vogt is an ornithologist, once editor of Bird Lore, who (to quote the book's jacket) "became interested in the relationship of man to his environment through his studies of bird behavior." Now chief of the Conservation Section of the Pan American Union, he still seems to care as much for "wildlife" (especially birds but including bighorn sheep) as he does for the .human species...
...soil men laugh at the Neo-Malthusian doctrine that man must adapt himself to soil, and live with it as helplessly as wildlife. Man is not the servant of the soil, they say. He is its master...
...quickly the practice of conservation will spread throughout the world, U.S. soil men cannot say. But they do say that the obstacles are economic and social, not technical. Science can stop most kinds of soil deterioration and will surely lick the rest. For the Neo-Malthusian scare-dogma that the world's soil must inevitably lose its productiveness, the soil men have a one-word answer: bunkum...
Fruit Flies Do It. An essential part of the Neo-Malthusian creed is the conviction that people will multiply blindly (like fruit flies) as long as they get enough food. Biologists can put a few fruit flies in an air-conditioned bottle, give them the same amount of food each day, and predict pretty accurately how fast they will breed. The fly population grows until there are just enough flies to eat up the daily food. Only then does the colony stop growing...