The Population Bomb Is Fizzling, But That Won’t Save the Planet
Human ingenuity thwarted past predictions of population-growth-induced disaster. Now that population growth is slowing, it’s still ingenuity that we need.
It might help to stop biting the hand that feeds us.
Photographer: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images
For more than two centuries, thoughtful people have been worrying that rising populations would overtax the world’s resources. “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race,” English clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus wrote in his “Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798. A hundred and seventy years later, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich argued pretty much the same thing in “The Population Bomb”:
Malthus and Ehrlich were both right that population growth was accelerating. England’s population doubled in the half century after 1798; the world’s population doubled from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 7 billion in 2011, just six years later than Ehrlich had predicted.