ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES: SYNTHESIS AND APPLICATION

Home Page Requirements Paper Assignments Quantitative Exercises Group Projects Course Schedule Resource Archive Email the Class

THURSDAY, APRIL 3 POPULATION AND CONSUMPTION Today we will deal with the specifics of population and its effect on the environment. In order to do the exercise on popluation due for next Tuesday, you should have read chapters 1 and 3 of Massimo Livi-Bassi's A Concise History of World Population. This gives you a general idea of how population has increased through world history, and particularly why population is so much more of a problem since the mid-20th century than it ever was before. We will begin with a review of some of the basic principles of demography, making sure that you have all the factors and their interactions straight. Next will come a discussion of Malthusianism and anti-Malthusianism. You should begin your preparation for this by reading the Preface and Chapters 1 and 2 of Book One of Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, which is the foundational text of demography, and the magisterial summary of the history of population thinking ever since, presented in Nathan Keyfitz's "Population Growth, Development, and the Environment." You should be thinking, as you read these, of several specific questions: What are the origins of anti-Malthusianism, among such widely different groups as Fascists, Communists, and academic liberals? Does the I = PAT equation offer us a way out of the debate? Does the concept of ecological footprint offer us a way out of the debate? How would a Malthusian and an anti-Malthusian think differently about the paper on the environmental crisis that is due next Wednesday? This will probably take up the class time. If not, we can spend more time fiddling online with population profiles. If you want to look at these on your own, a good place to find them is The U.S. Census Bureau International Database. Have fun!