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Will Malthus Be Right? by Niles Eldredge His forecast was ahead of its time, but nature may still put a lid on humanity... 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. The most casual cruise on the 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... The tide is running back toward Malthus. We are emerging from a 10,000-year vacation from nature still not fully realizing that our own survival hinges on reducing the damage we do to Earth's natural systems. We may not drive ourselves to the complete oblivion of biological extinction, but I fear that the Malthusian specters of famine, warfare and disease will rise in the comparatively short run (the next few centuries), coupled with an accelerating loss of human cultural diversity and, ultimately, quality of life. Unless. We can, I think, find the inner will to wake up to our current situation, to see the grimmer outlook around the corner and to choose to do something about it. We can stabilize our numbers and temper our patterns of consumption. We can work to stem the tide of ecosystem destruction and species loss. We can, in short, see ourselves for what we have become: the first global economic entity, a fascinating state arrived at through no end of cleverness but a state that is ultimately limited by the health and productivity of the natural system in which we live. We can, if we choose to do so, prove Malthus' direst prognostications wrong. |
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