After more than a century of intermittent haunting, the ghost of a gloomy British clergyman, Thomas Robert Malthus, was on the rampage last week. Cresting a wave of postwar pessimism, it flashed through the air on the radio, rode through the mails in magazines. Publishers opened their arms and presses to "Neo-Malthusian" manuscripts prophesying worldwide overpopulation and hunger. Two "scarce books"—Our Plundered Planet, by Fairfield Osborn, and Road to Survival (a Book-of-the-Month selection), by William Vogt—were glowingly reviewed and selling like hot cakes. Their influence has already reached around the world.
Malthus, who died in 1834, predicted that the world's population would soon outgrow its food supply. Then war, pestilence and famine, caused by overpopulation, would slap down presumptuous man. This did not happen. The world's population had doubled since Malthus' time, from one billion to two, but new lands were cultivated and old lands made more productive. Better transportation brought surplus food from afar to feed the hungry industrial cities. There were local famines, as there had always been, but the world never ran out of food. The gloomy Malthus, who had underestimated both nature's resources and man's resourcefulness, had been wrong.
Played-Out Planet? The Neo-Malthusians admit that he was wrong. But they claim that new and frightening threats have developed recently. The present-day world, they say, has no fresh lands (or almost none) to cultivate. Its old lands, "plundered" by reckless exploitation, are losing fertility as their "irreplaceable topsoil" washes down the rivers. Farmlands cannot maintain their present production. The world's population is still increasing rapidly, and modern medicine, by cutting the death rate from infectious diseases, is sure to quicken this increase. The falling food-production curve, cry the Neo-Malthusians, will soon cross the rising population curve. Then—kaput!
The Neo-Malthusian propaganda has, on the face of it, a high and beneficent purpose: to favor good farming practices. A similar erosion scare in the 19305 did result in widespread adoption of erosion-control practices. Some of the clear implications of the present scare, however, give unintended comfort to political and social policies that are anything but beneficent. If even rich nations like the U.S. have, too little land to keep their people passably well fed (as some of the doom-criers try to prove), then what should they do? The answer, for any vigorous people, is obvious. Go out and grab more land, clearing it, if necessary, of its present population.
The Neo-Malthusians want to warn man of danger; but their alarm is so loud that it may have the effect of deafening the world to its opportunities. To the real agricultural scientists, close to the soil and its sciences, such pessimism sounds silly or worse. Every main article of the Neo-Malthusian creed, they say, is either false or distorted or unprovable. They are sure that the modern world has both the soil and the scientific knowledge to feed, and feed well, twice as many people as are living today. By the time population has increased that much, man may (and probably will) have discovered new ways of increasing his food supply.