Although Malthus was wrong, he was dead right

Earth’s population is the elephant in the room.

Thomas Malthus (right) first alerted the earth to population difficulties when he wrote about the issue in the late 1800s.

Many of his predictions were well-wide of the mark and so his credibility collapsed, however the elephant is still there and getting bigger.

Malthus’s predictions, as time illustrated, came out of a vacuum of understanding about man’s innovative nature or his growing grasp of technology because, in fact, most of the technology that transformed life on earth had not been thought of, let alone invented.
Human numbers on earth are growing exponentially with nearly seven billion jammed on board and the best estimates put that number at about nine billion by 2050.
Sixty years ago, 1950, earth’s population was about 2.5 billion and although the bus was then a little overloaded, it seemed the planet’s resources were coping.
However, the numbers have since crept inexorably upward as we have become better at preserving life, despite our seemingly blind insistence throughout the 20th century at slaughtering millions of our fellows.
We have become technologically smarter and although we can see things whose existence is small in the extreme and beyond the understanding of most, we can’t see, or don’t want to talk about, the elephant in the room, earth’s population.
Those around the world with sufficient influence to alter attitudes on population, simply don’t, or won’t, go there as it means promoting or espousing ideas that question a fundamental of humanity, procreation.
Various plagues have decimated humans on an off for centuries, but the worst plague – that’s you and me and our fellows – goes on largely unnoticed and additions, certainly in the developed world, are greeted with celebration.
Opportune times to grasp a kindly solution seem to have passed with nature poised to illustrate that our place here hinges on collaboration, friendliness and the abandonment of perverse human traits that has seen the human landscape forever troubled by competition and confrontation.
Humans, like all other life forms, have an insatiable need to maintain and extend their gene pool, but forces most don’t understand will soon halt that and decimate humanity