MALTHUS: MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER

• William R. Catton, Jr.
• August 1, 1998
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
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MALTHUS: MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER
An NPG Forum Paper
by William R. Catton, Jr.
August 1998

For the last two hundred years, Malthus’ An Essay on the Principles of Population has served to define the terms of debate on human population growth and the Earth’s capacity to provide subsistence. And, if human civilization lasts that long, William Cation’s 1980 book, Overshoot may well turn out to be the definitive statement on this issue for the next two centuries. In this Forum, Cation elucidates the contemporary relevance of Malthus, by examining the concept of overshoot — the ability of humans to temporarily expand their numbers at the expense of the natural world’s long-term sustainability— in the context of Charles Darwin’s understanding of population competition.

Malthus, Darwin, and Population Competition 

In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus tried to inform “people that a human population, like a population of any other species, had the potential to increase exponentially were it not limited by finite support from its resource base. He warned us that growth of the number of human consumers and their demands will always threaten to outrun the growth of sustenance. When Charles Darwin read Malthus, he recognized more fully than most other readers that the Malthusian principle applied to all species. And Darwin saw how reproduction beyond replacement can foster a universal competitive relationship among a population’s members, as well as how expansion by a population of one species may be at the expense of populations of other species.

Others were not so perceptive. When I was in high school, the textbook used in my biology class listed “Over-production of individuals” first among “the chief factors assigned by Darwin to account for the development of new species from common ancestry through natural selection” (Moon and Man, 1933:457), but it did not cite Malthus nor discuss his concerns about population pressure. That neglect was typical because, for a while, “it was argued widely that developments had disproved Malthus, that the problem was no longer man’s propensity to reproduce more rapidly than his sustenance, but his unwillingness to reproduce adequately in an industrial and urban setting” (Taeuber, 1964:120).

Malthus in the Age of Exuberance

Most of us can remember learning in school to dismiss Malthus as “too pessimistic.” Technological progress and the economic growth resulting therefrom, we learned to assume, can always provide the essential consumables (or substitutes) that have permitted exuberant population growth. One of my college textbooks put it this way: “For conditions as they existed in 1798, Malthus was reasonably sound in his doctrines., but scientific and technological changes in the interval since his day have made Malthusian principles, in large part, an intellectual curiosity in our era” (Barnes. 1948:51).

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