Technology and sustainability (original) (raw)

This essay reviews the debate between Ehrlich and Commoner in the early seventies on the role of population growth versus technology. Without underestimating the necessity of stabilizing our world population it emphasizes the role of clean and green technology. Commoner rightly pointed in that direction. The question In 1798 T.R. Malthus published his famous An essay on the Principle of Population, in which he discussed the relationship between population figures, population growth and the use of natural resources. Malthus predicted great problems-vice and misery-because the population was growing at a faster rate than food production. He was not the first to broach this subject, it was addressed by the Greek historian Herodotus (484-c. 425 BCE), but Malthus was the first to put it in a global perspective. His work is still referred to today. In the second half of the last century The Club of Rome took up the theme in their famous Report (Meadows et al. 1972) and the biologist Paul Ehrlich showed himself to be an unadulterated neo-Malthusian. His books, The Population Bomb (1968), followed by The Population Explosion (1990), which he wrote with his wife, were both bestsellers. He focused not so much on the amount of food available but on mankind's total impact on the natural environment. Ehrlich believed that this impact was more than the earth could sustain and he, too, predicted disaster. The world would face hundreds of millions of starving people due to food shortages. But little heed was given to his warning. It seemed to have been set aside or overshadowed by other problems. Were Malthus and Ehrlich too sombre? Or are we indeed headed for disaster? Has the population issue been taken off the environmental agenda unjustly, or is it right to have been overshadowed by problems such as the threat of climate change and the loss of biodiversity?