Back in the 1970s, scientists worried that population growth was fa stapproaching a critical threshold beyond which the planet would be unable to support everybody. Optimists didn’t buy into this doom-laden ’limits to growth’ viewpoint, but believed in the power of technology to ‘fix’ future resource scarcity. Were they right?
Agricultural developments have given us massive increases in planet-wide grain production in the past. The invention of nuclear power transformed electricity generation. Developments like these lend support to the belief that human ingenuity has always been one step ahead of population pressure. The carrying capacity of the environment has been raised many times.
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