Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus is most famous for his treatise on population, declaring that while agricultural output grows only arithmetically as fallow land is brought into production, population grows geometrically, meaning that in the long run, famine and disease will always correct population downwards. His thesis was largely discredited as the nutrient-rich potato arrived in Western Europe, but still lurks in the background of academic thought, in the modern age perhaps most vigorously in the predicted global famine of Stanford University's Paul R. Erlich. [Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug's hybrid dwarf wheat was largely to credit this time around.] As time has gone on, in fact, food supplies and availability have grown to the extent that in 2006, the number of overweight people surpassed the number of the number of those considered undernourished. It has been said that hunger existing today is more a problem of distribution than supply.
Despite game-changing technological advancements in agriculture which have largely satisfied our global hunger [in number of calories, although not necessarily in nutrients], the ghost of Reverend Malthus lingers, but now rattling different chains. In Charles Mann's excellent book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Mr. Mann writes:
"Indeed, one way to summarize today's environmental disputes is to say that almost all boil down to the question of whether humankind will continue to accumulate wealth and knowledge, as has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, or whether the environmental impacts of that accumulation—soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, consumption of groundwater supplies, climate change—will snap shut the jaws of the Malthusian trap, returning the earth to pre-industrial wretchedness."
Troublingly, while many frame their understanding of the matter in soundbites and catchphrases, the smartest people on the planet are already talking about how to deal with a different world. The title of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) new report, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, pretty much says it all. Their trailer:
The policy implications of the Neo-Malthusian trap are, well, alarming. In the past, human ingenuity staved off Malthus' ghost. Hopefully we can enact the policy and create the solutions necessary to finish this story "happily ever after", and not like Grave Encounters, with the cast members vanishing one by one into the clutches of unsettled spirits.
