Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [11]
He continued:
On the whole, therefore, though our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish, yet they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude a gradual and progressive improvement in human society. . . . To the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his condition, we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius.
Many popular and professional writers today “rely on the first edition’s conclusions as being the essential Malthus, ” said the late economist Julian Simon, but “Malthus himself was a powerful critic of ’Malthusianism.’ ” Even Malthus biographer William Petersen noted, “From the first to the seventh edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, its author moved from an ecological to a sociological perspective . . . and—most remarkably—from an unrelenting pessimism to a cautious optimism.”
It wouldn’t be a stretch to describe neo-Malthusians as the opposite of cautious and optimistic. Paul Ehrlich, their demigod, opened his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, with these words: “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” In 1967, Lester Brown, another leading green who later founded the Worldwatch Institute, said, “The trend in grain stocks indicates clearly that 1961 marked a worldwide turning point. . . . [F]ood consumption moved ahead of food production.” In his 2000 bestseller, Earth in the Balance, former vice president Al Gore insisted that “population is pushing many countries over an economic cliff as their resources are stripped away and the cycle of poverty and environmental destruction accelerates.”
What’s regrettable is that the views of these environmental ideologues haven’t remained on the intellectual fringe, where they belong. Instead, they’ve guided the thinking of governments, international organizations, the press, and large swaths of an unwitting public. The notion that population growth causes or exacerbates poverty, resource scarcity, and ecological carnage has become received wisdom. In 1972 the Club of Rome, an influential global think tank, issued its “Limits to Growth” study, where it warned that the pace of population growth would lead directly to severe shortages of food, energy, minerals, trees, and other resources.
In 1980, the Carter administration issued the “Global 2000 Report,” which stated: “If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.” A 1994 World Population Conference report, signed by delegates from more than a hundred nations, called for “a sustainable balance between human numbers and the resources of the planet.” And so on. Over the decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department, U.S. Aid for International Development, the World Bank, the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, among others, have forecasted fertility-related doom.
In most cases, enough time has passed to prove empirically that these predictions were spectacularly wrong. But then, facts and evidence don’t really matter much to entrenched population alarmists. They are unwilling to test their hypotheses against data and reject them if they prove to be false. That’s because hard-core environmentalism is much more of a secular theology than a reality-based, empirically sensitive approach to the world. And the essence of a faith is