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Sustainability

The Five Horrorists

Tim Delaney foresees five threats to sustaining global civilization.

For centuries, social thinkers have pondered whether the Earth’s carrying capacity is being compromised by human overpopulation. For example, in his An Essay on the Principles of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus claimed that the world’s population was growing too quickly in proportion to the growth in the amount of food available. His theory was rather simple, and harshly criticized by later scholars such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who called it “false and childish.” But has Malthus’ concern about the number of people and the available food supply been proven accurate?

First, let’s take a brief look at Malthus’s theory from Marx’ and Engel’s point of view. Malthus ‘stupidly’ reduces two complicated issues – human reproduction and the natural reproduction of edible plants (our means of subsistence) – into two theorems.

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