Neo-Malthusians Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

The neo-Malthusian movement is one of the most prolific and fatalistic groups among public intellectuals examining the fate of the environment. This movement’s ideology rests on the premise that an out-of-control rate of population growth is one of the single most important factors adversely impacting human deprivation and the Earth’s resources. One cannot fully appreciate the intellectual impact of the movement without first situating it within the historical context of ecological and sustainability doctrines.

Historical Context

Neo-Malthusian thinking traces its roots to the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834). In 1798, Malthus published the first edition of his iconoclastic Essay on Population, asserting that population increases in a geometric rate (i.e., 2, 4, 8, etc.) in contrast to the arithmetic rate of food production (i.e., 1, 2, 3, etc.). This observation led him to conclude that, unless some measures of population control take place, humans will suffer hunger, calamities, and deprivation, since they will exhaust the Earth’s necessary resources to sustain life. He also asserted that population growth has a positive correlation with the rate of production, adding to further demands for non-renewable resources. When Malthus wrote his treatise in the 18th century, he was responding to the intellectual optimism of the Enlightenment, particularly the potent influence of the Marquis de Condorcet’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, as well as the optimistic views of his own father.

Ecological sociology is indebted to Malthus for much of its analysis of the various ways humans impact their own environment. Environmentalists often cite his cautionary pessimism when they analyze the state of the Earth’s resources. Demographers are indebted to him for his first examining the social impact of fertility rates and thus justifying the need for a national census to keep track of population movement and growth. His ideas also influenced evolutionist thinking in economics and biology.

Neo-Malthusianism

During the first half of the 20th century, conservationists argued that scarcity of resources and population pressures necessitated the establishment of sanctuaries to preserve ecosystems, thereby influencing the creation of national parks and a federal agency to oversee them. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published his best-selling book, The Population Bomb, and generated one of the most contentious and prolonged debates within the environmental movement. In his book, this unabashed neo-Malthusian attributed most of the environmental degradation to the ever-increasing population and made several controversial predictions, such as the possibility that millions would face starvation. In a nutshell, Ehrlich’s argument was not much different than that of Malthus. He insisted that the Earth’s capacity to produce food was reaching its limits; attempts to increase food production would further degrade the environment and in turn cause such problems as plagues and even social upheavals. However, neo-Malthusian critics countered that there were other, more significant causes of degradation, such as technology, in particular nuclear contamination, energy pollutants, and even “the tragedy of the common”—the selfish motivation of individuals to maximize their own utilization of resources, disregarding the common social good—among others.

These and other writings helped institutionalize sustainable development ideas in the policy arena. Just 4 years after Ehrlich’s book, the neo-Malthusian argument resurged again, this time with publication of the global think tank Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. Yet, the most radical position in the spectrum of the environmental debate was held by a new generation of neo-Malthusians. Far from unified and cohesive, this radical approach draws on several philosophical positions to argue that wilderness preservation must be the cornerstone of any theorizing about contemporary life. The two most prominent groups among radical environmentalists are the advocates of deep ecology and Greenpeace. The latter established its reputation by leading perilous confrontational actions—which they regard as “bearing witness”—to stop what they view as outrageous exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources and the human condition by commercial interests.

In general, radical neo-Malthusians exhibit a profound distrust for multinational corporations and their practices; they link environmental degradation to the growth of capitalist development throughout the world. As such, this viewpoint perceives degradation not just as endemic of voluntary human action, but also as a derivative of deterministic advanced capitalist laws. They advocate a reexamination of industrial production practices and a scaling down of consumption patterns. The bulk of their work is in four “campaign” areas: toxic waste, energy, nuclear issues, and ocean and terrestrial ecology.

Development economists caution that a sizable population ultimately increases the poverty rate among developing nations without sufficient productive capacity to absorb the number of newcomers into the labor force. Expenses to support safety net policies such as education and public health can also affect per capita income. However, some skeptics argue that underdevelopment results from inappropriate policies, institutional regimes, and ill-advised interventionist tendencies.

In addition to criticism for its dire predictions, neo-Malthusianism also endures critics from both sides of the political spectrum. Conservatives highlight that many assumptions of the neo-Malthusian models are simply wrong. For instance, they point out that the production of synthetic foods will actually produce an overabundance of staples. The fact that some people remain poor and hungry is not because of the lack of resources but rather because of faulty distribution networks. Critics from the other side knock the neo-Malthusians for their failure to account for class interests. They argue that the benefits of capitalism are unevenly dispersed along class lines, and therefore population is not the problem as much as the amount of political power accrued along class lines to influence policy.

Bibliography:

Barnes, Harry Elmer. 1969. An Introduction to the History of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Birdsall, Nancy, Allen C. Kelley, and Steven Sinding, eds. 2003. Population Matters: Demography Change, Economic Development and Poverty in the Developing World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gross, Matthias. 2004. “Human Geography and Ecological Sociology.” Social Science History 28:575-605.
McCormick, John. 1989. Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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