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A FEW WORDS ON GLOBAL
OVERPOPULATION
Gabor Pirisi
It is no exaggeration to say that people concerned about the future of human
societies at any point in the past millennia have been preoccupied with
overpopulation. The principles of population regulation, the achievement of
stability and the prevention of overpopulation appear, for example, in Aristotle’s
description of the ideal society in Politics in the 4* century B.C., or in Thomas
More’s Utopia, published in 1516. The issue also filtered into the popular culture
of all periods: in the 1950s, one of the fathers of science fiction, Isaac Asimov,
reflected on the future of humankind through the lens of overpopulation, and in
our times the iconic supervillain of Marvel, Thanos would settle the problem of
galactic overpopulation with a snap of his fingers. These are just a few randomly
selected examples but sufficient to illustrate that the problem at issue was, is and
presumably will also be on the agenda for a long time.
The core of the problem of the rapid growth of humankind was succinctly and
poetically worded by Imre Madäch in The Tragedy of Man. It lives on in the
Hungarian language as the adage “eskimos are many and seals are few” as an
adequate formulation of the fundamental problem: the growing inequality between
population and resources." In his treatise, On the Principle of Population, published
in 1798 and still making its impact felt in the present day, Thomas Malthus deemed
the catastrophe more or less unavoidable. His statement that the rate of food
production cannot keep abreast of population growth has elicited repeated responses
to this day (Malthus 1798). In a far more up-to-date and scientific form, the same
idea was repeated in The Limits to Growth, also known as the Meadows report,
inspired by the Club of Rome on the basis of MIT computerized simulations.
This report set the depletion of non-renewable resources against the growth of the
population. Its conclusion is that the trap can only be avoided with a zero growth
strategy, which is staggering and for practical reasons unacceptable (Meadows et
al. 1972). The paradigm of sustainable development arose later partly from these
foundations. It is desperately trying to balance between ecological, economic,
social and political realities, in the long run with more failure than success. It also
views the sustainable growth of the population as a key question (Elliott 2014;
World Commission on Environment and Development 1987).
In scene XIV, the playwright speaks even more brutally:
» Irue, I beat to death
Them that dwelt nigh me, but ‘is all in vain.
For ever come new folk, and seals are few.
Oh, if thou be a god, I pray thee grant
That there be less of men and more of seals.”