The way of the world

This book stands in an ancient intellectual tradition. Its theme dates back to the year 1798, in which the English economist Thomas Malthus published his famous theory of demography. Human population, Malthus reasoned, grows exponentially, as each extra couple multiplies itself in turn; whereas food production can increase only arithmetically, and beyond a point not at all. Return to equilibrium is possible only through starvation or disease, provoked either by natural catastrophe or by wars over the scarce remaining resources.

The resources of the earth have proved to be more elastic than Malthus foresaw. The mechanisms by which they may be exhausted are infinitely more complicated than he realised. And, apart from the phenomenon of soil exhaustion, which had been familiar to mankind since ancient times, he did not foresee the actual destruction of the productive capacity of the earth in the process of trying to extract more from it. Nor did he anticipate the technology by which mankind would one day acquire the means of controlling its own fertility. But for all this, Malthusian theory remains broadly speaking the foundation of most ecological concerns about mankind’s future.

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Kate Andrews

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Jared Diamond’s important book is a sober account by a reputable American scientist of historical communities in which the Malthusian dynamic has gone to its ultimate conclusion: collapse. Easter Island is probably the paradigm case, and certainly the best known. Diamond starts with it. After the first arrival of men on the island, they lived on their capital, consuming the produce of what was once a thickly wooded paradise, rich in animal and plant life. Prosperity multiplied their numbers, and in the course of about 500 years the island became a desert, the forest vanished. Without trees, the soil eroded and supported no crops; bird and mammal life became extinct; men could no longer make canoes from which to fish.