Thomas Robert Malthus has had a very long run. Issuing his first essay on population in 1798, he has persuaded millions of people that the world is threatened by overpopulation.“The effect of Malthusianism was immediate and dramatic,” writes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. “For half a century social attitudes and policies were decisively shaped by the new turn of thought.”[1] And the impact continues.Until November I had never read Malthus’s essay.[2] To my surprise, it is a delightful … [Read more...]
Are “Fixer Upper” Stars Wrecking the Earth with their Children?
You'd have thought congratulations were in order when HGTV's Chip and Joanna Gaines, of Fixer Upper, announced they're expecting their fifth child. Some congratulations did come, but so did some nasty criticism. The gist: With four, they have too many already. The world's overpopulated, and it's selfish of them to add more children. US Magazine headlined its story, "Some People Are Pissed About Chip and Joanna Gaines' Baby News: 'I Hope This One Will Be Your Last'," and quoted from some social … [Read more...]
How to Prevent Climate Change? Prevent Births!
For 218 years---since Thomas Robert Malthus published the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population---people have been coming up with new rationales for limiting or even reducing human population. For Malthus, the fundamental reason is that people ate too much, so increasing their numbers would lead to starvation as farmers' ability to raise enough food fell behind a mushrooming population. Others since then have expanded his argument to all kinds of other resources---forests, … [Read more...]
The Haunt of Jackals
Various passages of the Bible set forth the complete elimination of human habitation in a land as the epitome of God’s judgment. I have long found it remarkable that much of the environmental movement sees as ideal what Scripture depicts as hideous. One place that does so is Isaiah 34, in which God through the Prophet Isaiah foretells, in sometimes apocalyptic poetic language, His judgment on Edom and the other pagan nations that oppressed Israel and Judah: 1“Draw near, O nations, to hear, and … [Read more...]
“The End of Doom” Sadly Doesn’t Mean the End of Doomsters
In previous books Ecoscam (1993), The True State of the Planet (edited, 1995), Earth Report 2000 (edited, 2000), Global Warming and Other Eco-myths (edited, 2002), and Liberation Biology (2005), plus many articles in Reason and elsewhere, Ronald Bailey has marshaled, often with other authors, massive amounts of hard data against environmental doomsters' claims of present or predictions of future disasters from population growth, resource depletion, pollution, species extinction, and … [Read more...]
Is Pope Francis Contributing to Human Trafficking?
Speaking to a gathering of mayors from around the world at the Vatican July 21, Pope Francis urged action to reduce global warming, saying he particularly hopes the UN climate summit later this year will address how it "affects the trafficking of people." Problem #1: Human-induced climate change has not affected the trafficking of people, or even migration in general. The one and only candidate for climate-change refugee status, a man from the island of Kiribati, just lost his case on appeal, … [Read more...]
Total Takedown on Paul Ehrlich and Fears of Overpopulation
Stunning that the reliably liberal and alarmist NYT runs an article, "The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion," with equally stunning video demonstrating that Paul Ehrlich, author of the uber-alarmist The Population Bomb (1968), was totally, totally wrong. The full case for Ehrlich's idiocy on the economics of demography is far, far stronger than the article and video show, but even so, they're a total take-down of Ehrlich. Why ANYONE has ever considered Ehrlich even simply a … [Read more...]
