Word: neo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
Some nations and religious groups make vigorous efforts to increase the numbers of their people. They are seldom if ever successful. Thoroughly Roman Catholic Eire has one of the lowest birth rates in the world and its population is stable. Eire is behaving more or less as the Neo-Malthusians want all countries to behave. It is not industrializing (Vogt hates industrialization), it is not greatly increasing food production. But 79% of Irishmen under 30 and 60% under 40 are not married. Thirty-five percent of Irishwomen do not marry at all. "Ecologists" might call this balance; few sociologists would...
...Neo-Malthusians point to India and China and warn that if the world helps them increase their food supply, they will respond by overwhelming the world with a billion more Asiatics. Vogt is especially loud in crying this warning. He even wants the U.S. to stop sending food to Greece, lest the Greeks process each ton of wheat into more Greek mouths...
Such super-isolationism, with hints of the old "yellow peril," is one of the ugliest Implications of Neo-Malthusianism. The world is already overpopulated, the argument goes. Some areas, like the U.S., are luckier than others, but even the U.S. will soon run out of food. Therefore it should not help foreigners. Let them starve now, before they increase their numbers (with our help) and overwhelm...