Word: neo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Neo-Malthusian propaganda has, on the face of it, a high and beneficent purpose: to favor good farming practices. A similar erosion scare in the 19305 did result in widespread adoption of erosion-control practices. Some of the clear implications of the present scare, however, give unintended comfort to political and social policies that are anything but beneficent. If even rich nations like the U.S. have, too little land to keep their people passably well fed (as some of the doom-criers try to prove), then what should they do? The answer, for any vigorous people, is obvious...
...Neo-Malthusians want to warn man of danger; but their alarm is so loud that it may have the effect of deafening the world to its opportunities. To the real agricultural scientists, close to the soil and its sciences, such pessimism sounds silly or worse. Every main article of the Neo-Malthusian creed, they say, is either false or distorted or unprovable. They are sure that the modern world has both the soil and the scientific knowledge to feed, and feed well, twice as many people as are living today. By the time population has increased that much...
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...
...second main dogma of the Neo-Malthusians is their belief that the productivity of the world's cultivated land is falling now and is sure to fall even more because of erosion and exhaustion. The enormous crops that the U.S. raised this year, they say, are a cruel illusion; they were achieved by "soil mining," and will be paid for inexorably in future crop failures...