While in relative terms human population growth is declining, leading to a grayer planet, in absolute numbers it is still increasing, most recently among young males in the most fragile states, the ones who cause political upheaval. Water shortages and desertification have been environmental background noises to the Arab Spring and the war in Yemen. The history of the earth and man does not proceed smoothly. True, human ingenuity can eventually solve every resource problem, but often not in time to prevent major political upheavals. Perhaps the reason why Malthus always has to be denounced as wrong is because the biting fear exists that at some basic level he is right. He imagined the political effects of such things as disease and famine, and the miserable quality of life among the badly urbanized poor. He saw man as a biological species affected by natural conditions and the densities in which we inhabit the earth. Nevertheless, Malthus helped introduce the subject of ecosystems into contemporary political philosophy, thereby immeasurably enriching it. It is quite true, Malthus’s specific theory – that population increases geometrically while food supplies increase only arithmetically – never worked out, because of the role of human ingenuity in exponentially increasing food supply. The media elite, protected from nature in their urban bubbles, never tire of pronouncing Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in England in 1798, as wrong. Mention the name “Malthus” and you are met with a storm of abuse.
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