Word: rightness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Malthus was right. So read a car bumper sticker on a busy New Jersey highway the other day, and it got me thinking about the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English political economist who gave the "dismal science" its nickname. His "Essay on the Principle of Population," published in 1798, predicted a gloomy future for humanity: our population would grow until it reached the limits of our food supply, ensuring that poverty and famine would persistently rear their ugly faces to the world...
...Internet shows how much debate Malthus still stirs today. Basically, the Pollyannas of this world say that Malthus was wrong; the population has continued to grow, economies remain robust--and famines in Biafra and Ethiopia are more aberrations than signs of the future. Cassandras reply that Malthus was right, but techno-fixes have postponed the day of reckoning. There are now 6 billion people on Earth. The Pollyannas say the more the merrier; the Cassandras say that is already twice as many as can be supported in middle-class comfort, and the world is running out of arable land...
What's missing from the debate is an understanding of the changing relationship between humanity and nature. For it is how humans fit into the natural world that will settle whether Malthus was right or wrong. He was wrong in 1798. But if he had been writing 10,000 years earlier, before agriculture, he would have been right. And were his book being published today, on the brink of the third millennium, he would be more right than wrong. Let me explain...
Aquaculture--fish farming--has established beachheads from Maine to the tropics, from the South Pacific to the North Sea. Raising fish in enclosed pens is a complex and controversial process that can pose enormous environmental problems, but if done right, it holds great promise for feeding millions of people and providing vast numbers of jobs...
...That's right--as we move into the 21st century, we are steadily getting pudgier. Fat, some would have you believe, is the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse, riding right alongside War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. And it's immensely lucrative. Do you think the shrewd folks at Jenny Craig, Slim-Fast and Weight Watchers could make billions scaring the bejesus out of you about pestilence? Make no mistake--fat phobia is a big moneymaker for those who have figured out how to promote and cash in on self-hatred...