ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the reception by the Norwegian media of Georg Borgström’s ideas from the 1950s to the early 1970s by inspiring recent historical research on the circulation of knowledge. It focuses on Borgström’s impact in one country – Norway – based on material from the Norwegian National Library’s digital newspaper collection, a near-complete archive of all Norwegian newspapers, local and national, since 1763. In the international development debates in Norway over the population-food dilemma, Borgström’s research was frequently used to underscore pessimistic interpretations. The chapter looks at the timing of, attention to, and impact of Borgström by examining the circulation of Borgström’s message in the Norwegian public sphere in the 1950s and 1960. Regarding timing, the attention paid to Borgström’s message on the population-food dilemma beginning in the late 1940s onwards, preceded by two decades that paid to Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons”.
