Mister-Skank - Hobbyist, Traditional Artist | DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Literature

Meditation 11/8/2024

Meditation In 1960, when I was a senior in high school, the world population was three billion, and the phrase of the day was “the population explosion.” This was the lead story in one issue of Newsweek magazine, which assessed the apocalypse possibly approaching and even the feasibility of colonizing other planets to reduce the human burden on earth. My economics teacher moderated a debate on the topic and assigned students Thomas Malthus’s 1798 “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” which predicted massive world famine, and John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 “The Affluent Society,” which addressed the growing disparity between the world rich and the world poor and the industrial degradation of the planet. Despite two horrific world wars, dozens of horrific lesser wars, genocides, countless ghastly famines and plagues, an ever-increasing number of climate catastrophes, and countless homicides and suicides, the current world population is eight billion. Although each day about 180,000