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Seeing the Population Issue Whole
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10742 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1993 |
4,161 Words |
| Author
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Donella H. Meadows
Donella H. Meadows is adjunct professor of environmental
studies at Dartmouth College. She is coauthor of The Limits to
Growth (Universe Books, 1972) and Beyond the Limits:
Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future
(Chelsea Green Publishing Company 1992.) |
The debate has been going on for almost two hundred years, since the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, 0 in reaction to a group of optimistic French writers, penned his famous dictum in his 1978 Essay on the Principle of Population: "Taking the population of the world at any number…of--1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, &c, and subsistence as--1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, &c.
Since then, the label Malthusian has been attached to those who believe that the human population could push or is pushing against the earth's resources. Their opponents, the anti-Malthusians, hold that this fear is not only exaggerated but dangerous. At best, they believe, it expresses too little faith in the adaptive, creative potential of humankind. At worst, they say, it allows some people to declare other people too numerous, a threat to the plant--with horrendous social consequences.
The optimists sometimes are called cornucopians or Marxists, since Marx was one of the harshest critics of Malthus. Other labels for the two sides have been antinatalists or ecofreaks for the Malthusians and pronatalistsor technotwits for the anti-Malthusians.
Whatever the labels, since Malthus wrote, the human population has grown by a factor of six, and total human energy use by a factor of one hundred or so. Human life expectancy has increased nearly everywhere. The forest cover of the earth has been cut by a third and the area of undisturbed wetlands by half. The composition of the atmosphere has been altered by human-generated pollution. Hundreds of millions of people have starved to death; thousands of species have gone extinct. Mines and oil wells have been discovered. The economy has gone on growing.
One reason the argument continues is that history offers such mixed evidence. If you are part of the richest 20 percent of the world's population, you can easily read the past as an uninterrupted human triumph over the limits of the earth. If you are among the desperately poor, you might well agree with Malthus. As he put it, in A Summary View of the Principle of Population (1839), "The pressure arising from the difficult of procuring subsistence is not to be considered as a remote one which will be felt only when the earth refuses to produce any more, but as one which actually exists at present over the greatest part of the globe."
Or, as ecologist Garrett Hardin put it, writing in the November 1972 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "Malthus has been
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