Humans can almost always rise to fix problems…

Over at Planet Gore, Edward Craig brings up an article by Bendan O’Neill arguing how environmentalists of the Malthus persuasion (i.e., there’s too many of us for our environment; we’re all gonna die – so start killing ourselves and have government implement mandatory population control) keep the same meme – and are wrong (emphasis mine and shortened to bullet points):

The language used to justify population scaremongering has changed dramatically over the centuries. In the time of Malthus in the eighteenth century the main concern was with the fecundity of poor people. In the early twentieth century there was a racial and eugenic streak to population-reduction arguments. Today they have adopted environmentalist language to justify their demands for population reduction.

The fact that the presentational arguments can change so fundamentally over time, while the core belief in ‘too many people’ remains the same, really shows that this is a prejudicial outlook in search of a social or scientific justification; it is prejudice looking around for the latest trendy ideas to clothe itself in. And that is why the population scaremongers have been wrong over and over again: because behind the new language they adopt every few decades, they are really driven by narrow-mindedness, by disdain for mankind’s breakthroughs, by willful ignorance of humanity’s ability to shape its surroundings and its future.

• The first mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate how society can change to embrace more and more people. They make the schoolboy scientific error of imagining that population is the only variable, the only thing that grows and grows, while everything else — including society, progress and discovery — stays roughly the same.
• The second mistake Malthusians always make is to imagine that resources are fixed, finite things that will inevitably run out. They don’t recognize that what we consider to be a resource changes over time, depending on how advanced society is.
• And the third and main mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate the genius of mankind.

We don’t merely use up finite resources; we create infinite ideas and possibilities. The 6.7billion people on Earth have not raped and destroyed this planet, we have humanised it.

The glass is always half full, in my outlook.  The major problem is that this Malthusian outlook is being adopted by the political class via the environmentalists – requiring the baby steps of loss of individual freedoms and greater governmental interference all in the name of sustainability.  

Example?  Read your history and re-discover the wailing over diminishing whale oil.  Or the stink over horse manure in the cities before the internal combustion engines.

Have or allow Big Government the ability to clamp down too much and we may lose the political and intellectual environment necessary to dream of, design, and bring to fruition those inventions that can solve our problems.