The Environmental Malthusian Dilemma

• Thomas Malthus was a doleful soul -- an economist of the late 1700s, who pointed out the gloomy mathematics of a population that was growing exponentially in a world with a finite number of acres to feed its inhabitants. While Malthus focused on the potential for starvation, he is an important thinker in the world of environmentalism because pollution, greenhouse gasses, landfill, habitat loss -- all of the negative effects that modern recycling tries to circumvent -- are also byproducts of population explosion. Malthus' concerns are readily apparent in modern environmentalism.