![]() Yet, by the same token, it is a tradition that has often sought to reduce environmental change to a mere function of population size or growth. By 1972, the Club of Rome had released its World Model ( 9), which represented the first computer-based population-environment modeling effort, predicting an “overshoot” of global carrying capacity within 100 years.Ĭlearly, efforts to understand the relationship between demographic and environmental change are part of a venerable tradition. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb ( 8), which focused public attention on the issue of population growth, food production, and the environment. National Academy of Sciences published The Growth of World Population ( 7), a report that reflected scientific concern about the consequences of global population growth, which was then reaching its peak annual rate of two percent. ![]() Although the subject was periodically taken up again in the ensuring decades, with for example George Perkins Marsh’s classic Man and Nature (1864) ( 4) and concern over human-induced soil depletion in colonial Africa ( 5, 6), it was not until the 1960s that significant research interest was rekindled. Malthus’ famous hypothesis was that population numbers tend to grow exponentially while food production grows linearly, never quite keeping pace with population and thus resulting in natural “checks” (such as famine) to further growth. Humans have sought to understand the relationship between population dynamics and the environment since the earliest times ( 1, 2), but it was Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population ( 3) in 1798 that is credited with launching the study of population and resources as a scientific topic of inquiry.
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