Global Environmental Politics Problems, Policy and Practice

Introduction

Concerns about over-population trace back to Babylonian times. Babylonian mythology was first recorded in about 1600 BC and those inscribed tablets reveal the gods’ annoyance at multiplying humans and their noisy ways. Plagues, floods, and finally infertility were supposedly inflicted on humans to control their numbers and leave the gods in peace and quiet (Cohen 1995: 5–6). The idea that natural catastrophes would provide a check on human populations is more commonly associated with the eighteenth-century writings of English cleric Thomas Robert Malthus. While many of his contemporaries were engaging in ‘speculations about the perfectibility of man and of society’ (Malthus 1798: 3), Malthus could not share their optimism. Instead, he focused on the ‘unconquerable difficulties’ in realising their rosy pictures of the future. He was mostly concerned about a tension he saw in two fixed laws of nature: one, the necessity of food for man's existence, and two, the ‘passion between the sexes’ (1798: 4). These laws exist in tension, he argued, because food and population cannot possibly grow at the same rate: ‘Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio’ (1798: 4). Without any social controls on population growth, the natural world imposes its own limits in ways that produce significant human suffering: families are forced to abandon children, and disease, malnourishment, and ultimately famine would suppress procreation and eliminate vast numbers.

An ever increasing population simply could not be sustained on a planet with finite limits. Malthus contemplated the possibility that liberal, educated men of limited financial means would avoid or delay marriage to avoid sharing their wealth and descending the social ladder. Fewer marriages would, in that era, necessarily mean fewer births (1798: 24–5). But the vast majority of men could not be relied upon to exercise such judgment or restraint. So minimising marriages could provide only a limited social check on population (1798: 24–5). Recognising their limited means, poorer people might prudently limit their family size. But Malthus observed that this was rare. Indeed, he rejected the ‘Poor Laws’ on the grounds that child support payments to poor labourers would further discourage smaller families. So although it might improve the condition of the poor in the short term, it would lead to scarcer resources in the long term (1798: 42).