Have We Reached the Limits to Growth?

by

14 January 2013

This article discusses challenges humanity faces to sustain life on Earth and if the human race has outgrown Earth’s limited resources.

The article begins as follows:

In 1967, William and Paul Paddock’s best-selling book Famine 1975! argued that stagnant agricultural productivity and growing populations would mean abandoning countries like Egypt and Haiti to starvation by the middle of the next decade. (1) In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb—another bestseller—warned that overpopulation would soon lead to starvation and social upheaval on an enormous scale. (2) In all caps on the cover, just under the title, were the words, “WHILE YOU ARE READING THESE WORDS FOUR PEOPLE WILL HAVE DIED OF STARVATION. MOST OF THEM CHILDREN.”

 Paul Ehrlich later denied having made any predictions in The Population Bomb, but in the original edition of the book he wrote

 The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

Ehrlich said we would need drastic population measures—like adding drugs that would sterilize people to their drinking water—to have any hope of avoiding catastrophe. Saving humanity would require preemptive genocide.

The remainder of the article is available in Anthropocene blog.

Image credit: NASA

Related Topics:

Recent Publications from GCRI

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

Recent Publications from GCRI

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

Recent Publications from GCRI

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Is climate change a global catastrophic risk? Warming temperatures are already causing a variety harms around the world, some quite severe, and they project to worsen as temperatures increase. However, despite the massive body of research on climate change, the...

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

Diversity is an important ethical concept. It’s also relevant to global catastrophic risk in at least two ways: the risk of catastrophic biodiversity loss and the need for diversity among people working on global catastrophic risk. It’s additionally relevant to...

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

Manipulating Aggregate Societal Values to Bias AI Social Choice Ethics

Manipulating Aggregate Societal Values to Bias AI Social Choice Ethics