ABSTRACT
Can you have too many people? Barring occasional ‘blips’, such as the Black Death of the 14th century which killed 75 million of the world’s people, the Earth’s population has always been expanding. The first well-known expression of concern that this phenomenon could lead to the world becoming overpopulated came at the end of the 18th century with the publication of ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ by the British economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus reasoned that the Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ of resources – particularly food – would soon be exceeded, for ‘[T]he power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man’ (Malthus 1798: 23-24). A Malthusian doomsday never came, but not because his line of argument was flawed. The
world’s population and resource consumption grew at a rate greater than ever in history in the following century but so did its carrying capacity as a result of the Industrial Revolution, which served to improve crop yields and resource extraction. Localized hunger and famine have persisted since then due to political failings but, on a global scale, overpopulation has never occurred and there remains enough food and fuel for everyone on Earth today. Malthus’ central concern, though, is still valid today, with many reasoning that the planet’s carrying capacity is now at around 9 billion, a figure likely to be reached around the middle of this century on current projections. Can technology and human ingenuity again be relied upon to feed the world’s people and avoid its degradation or is this a dangerous assumption? This, in many ways, is the quintessential question of environmental politics.
