Beware Malthusians in reasonable clothing The green critics of population control are just as misanthropic as their prophylactic-promoting opponents.

By Tim Black – Spike

The ambient jazzy, folky music - possibly nicked from a nearby Starbucks - had been turned to mute. The lights were dimmed. And the effect was near instant. The postgraduate-dominated audience under-populating the Bloomsbury Theatre in London was finally settling down in glum anticipation of ‘My vision for the future’, the first public event of ‘Population Footprints’ – a ‘UCL and Leverhulme Trust conference on human population growth and global carrying capacity’. Quite what the audience was expecting, I’m not sure. Doom-laden prophesying? Possibly. Encomia to family planning? Probably. Frighteningly self-righteous blather about there being too many people and too few resources? Almost definitely. This last, after all, is the great unmentionable that the green and the not-so-good can’t stop mentioning, a neo-Malthusian idea that has seized the withered imaginations of every repressed misanthrope from Forum for the Future founder Jonathon Porritt to the patron saint of wildlife programmes, Sir David Attenborough. As Attenborough himself said in a recent piece for the New Statesman: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed.’ For full article: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10560/