• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2207 0

people in the year 2105, and so on. But improvements in food production add rather than multiply: this breakthrough increases wheat yields by 25%, that breakthrough increases yields by an additional 20%, etc. That is, there is a basic difference between how population grows and how food production grows. When population grows, the extra people added to the population also themselves reproduce—as in compound interest, where the interest itself draws interest. That allows exponential growth. In contrast, an increase in food yield does not then further increase yields, but instead leads only to arithmetic growth in food production. Hence a population will tend to expand to consume all available food and never leave a surplus, unless population growth itself is halted by famine, war, or disease, or else by people making preventive choices (e.g., contraception or postponing marriage). The notion, still widespread today, that we can promote human happiness merely by increasing food production, without a simultaneous reining-in of population growth, is doomed to end in frustration—or so said Malthus.

The validity of his pessimistic argument has been much debated. Indeed, there are modern countries that have drastically reduced their population growth by means of voluntary (e.g., Italy and Japan) or government-ordered (China) birth control. But modern Rwanda illustrates a case where Malthus’s worst-case scenario does seem to have been right. More generally, both Malthus’s supporters and his detractors could agree that population and environmental problems created by non-sustainable resource use will ultimately get solved in one way or another: if not by pleasant means of our own choice, then by unpleasant and unchosen means, such as the ones that Malthus initially envisioned.

A few months ago, while I was teaching a course to UCLA undergraduates on environmental problems of societies, I came to discuss the difficulties that regularly confront societies trying to reach agreements about environmental disputes. One of my students responded by noting that disputes could be, and frequently were, solved in the course of conflict. By that, the student didn’t mean that he favored murder as a means of settling disputes. Instead, he was merely observing that environmental problems often do create conflicts among people, that conflicts in the U.S. often become resolved in court, that the courts provide a perfectly acceptable means of dispute resolution, and hence that students preparing themselves for a career of resolving environmental problems need to become familiar with the judicial system. The case of Rwanda is again instructive: my student was fundamentally correct about the frequency of resolution by conflict, but the conflict may assume nastier forms than courtroom processes.

In recent decades, Rwanda and neighboring Burundi have become synonymous in our minds with two things: high population, and genocide (Plate 21). They are the two most densely populated countries in Africa, and among the most densely populated in the world: Rwanda’s average population density is triple even that of Africa’s third most densely populated country (Nigeria), and 10 times that of neighboring Tanzania. Genocide in Rwanda produced the third largest body count among the world’s genocides since 1950, topped only by the killings of the 1970s in Cambodia and of 1971 in Bangladesh (at the time East Pakistan). Because Rwanda’s total population is 10 times smaller than that of Bangladesh, the scale of Rwanda’s genocide, measured in proportion to the total population killed, far exceeds that of Bangladesh and stands second only to Cambodia’s. Burundi’s genocide was on a smaller scale than Rwanda’s, yielding “only” a few hundred thousand victims. That still suffices to place Burundi seventh in the world since 1950 in its number of victims of genocide, and tied for fourth place in proportion of the population killed.

We have come to associate genocide in Rwanda and Burundi with ethnic violence. Before we can understand what else besides ethnic violence