For centuries now Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus has been, on and off, an object of derision because people associate him, unfairly, with predictions of a doomsday scenario in which humanity should long ago have suffered a population catastrophe. In fact, that wasn’t part of his fundamental thesis. He was, explicitly, putting a bee in the bonnets of the enlightenment philosophers who visualized a Utopian future for humanity in which every individual would have enough to eat. Malthus suggested that wouldn’t be achieved as long as population growth continued apace and, indeed, he seems to have been proven right by the events of the intervening centuries.

He was wrong about the arithmetic increase of the food supply. We’ve managed to make food supplies increase geometrically. Even so, someone is always starving.

In Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,”[1] one of his characters warns, “It is never safe to laugh at Dr. Malthus; he always has the last laugh.”

Those who want to take the risk and discredit Malthus might nevertheless point to two “green revolutions.” The first one came during the 20^th century when new science helped create sudden, astonishing growth in our food supply. In 1968 William Gaud, former director of the United States Agency for International Development called the achievement a “green revolution”[2] in a speech. He believed that the growth in our agricultural productivity would revolutionize human life worldwide. In fact, we did increase food production to keep up with worldwide population growth. The innovation that made this agricultural revolution possible was funded by wealthy nations like the U.S. who were concerned that famine in nearby poor nations, like Mexico, could threaten economic security.[3] U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, The Rockefeller Foundation and Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho got the wheels turning. The Ford Foundation and others soon pitched in to provide money to scientists who were working to increase food supplies. The production of cereal grains in developing nations more than doubled between 1961 and 1985.[4] In places like Mexico and India the gains were orders of magnitude more impressive.

Still, true to Malthus’ predictions, poverty and famine persisted. We fed a lot of people, but we never managed to feed everyone. Throughout the last quarter of the 20^th century the newspaper stories about mountainous piles of surplus grain in North America routinely ran side-by-wide with stories about starving multitudes in Africa.

BRYAN WELCH

At the beginning the 19^th century during the rosy dawn hours of the Industrial Revolution the world’s human population finally surpassed 1 billion individuals. [1] After about 200,000 years of evolution our extraordinary intellect and extreme mobility had brought us that far. We had, by then, colonized every continent except Antarctica. Civilized cultures were generally aware of the world as a finite sphere, 70 percent of it covered in water. We lived everywhere, from the sweltering tropics to the icy arctic wastelands.

We dominated everything we surveyed, but we couldn’t survey the microscopic yet, at least not very effectively. The germs still pretty much had their way with us. They limited human population growth. Average Europeans were lucky to live to 40 years of age. Almost a third of babies born in Europe’s cities died before their third birthdays, mostly due to diseases borne by microbes. People flocked to the cities where they found new affluence in factories and textile mills. The crowding in city tenements gave the pathogens an ideal habitat and accelerated the spread of disease.

Louis Pasteur was born in 1822[2] and soon began whipping the germs into shape.  With an uncanny instinct for the nature of disease, Pasteur revolutionized our understanding of the world and helped us train new weapons on the microbes that made us sick. Pasteur gave us the specific tools to fight cholera, anthrax and rabies, but more importantly he revolutionized our knowledge of microbes and their effect on our lives – both good and bad. We had been drinking wine for thousands of years but we didn’t know that bacteria caused fermentation. Pasteur identified disease-causing germs and invented tools for fighting them. Soon, people were living longer. More babies survived. Modern medicine was born, and human population growth accelerated.

By 1900 there were more than 1.6 billion of us, up 60 percent in one century. That population doubled in about 60 years, then doubled again in half the time. I was born into a worldwide human population of about 3 billion people. Based on current United Nations projections and my expected lifespan, there will probably be about 9 billion people on earth when I die.

So far we’ve done a remarkably good job of feeding all these new people. When you think about it, it’s almost miraculous that we’ve kept up with our own expansion. Shortly before Louis Pasteur was born, the English philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus made himself one of the world’s most famous thinkers by suggesting that unless we did something about population growth, we could never ease the burden of poverty. His basic thesis was that because our population expanded geometrically while food production expanded arithmetically, and because birth rates increase with prosperity, we would never be able to create consistent surpluses in food supply.

The poor, as Jesus of Nazareth said, would “always be with us.”[3] 

Tim Posey lived in a former barracks bought surplus from the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss, Texas, and moved a few miles into the dusty, unpaved village of Anapra, New Mexico in the late 1950s. Most of Tim’s 10 acres was devoted to his business – the Posey Trailer Park. But at the center of his property, surrounded by the trailers and the sand hills, Tim Posey’s homestead teemed with life. Milk goats bleated under a shed. Chickens scratched in the shade. Miraculously, two dozen kinds of vegetables sprung in abundance from the sand behind the horse stable. Past middle-aged, heavy and stiff with arthritis, Tim spent most of his time on a kitchen chair under one or another of the awnings he had built against his barns. He watched the animals, sharpened his tools and visited with his tenants when they stopped by. I remember him in dark sunglasses. I almost never saw him indoors.

I was 9 when Mr. Posey “hired” me. I lived a quarter-mile away with my family. The livestock and the garden drew me like magnets. Once I was certain he wouldn’t chase me off, I started spending nearly every spare moment there. He asked me if I wanted to learn how to milk the goats. Then he asked me if I was willing to do it every day. He paid me in produce, eggs and goat’s milk. My dad paid me cash for the food. It was my first job, and I loved it.

There are places on the continent more barren than the Chihuahuan desert, but not many. Creosote and mesquite bushes dot the sand hills. Most of the plants have spines or thorns. We called the surrounding landscape hills, but they were more like dunes. If you leave a junked car on the downwind side of a hill there, it will disappear under the sand in a few years or a few months, depending on the weather.

Mr. Posey boarded horses. He raised chickens, guineas, milk goats and honeybees.

I don’t know how long he had been moving manure from the chicken pens and horse corrals into the vegetable garden, but he had created a marvel there. Watermelons grew huge and dark green in the tangles of vines. On the ground between the rows of corn was a kind of moist wonderland of dappled light buzzing with insects.

It’s hard to describe the emotional impact of encountering all that life in the context of our garbage-strewn village in the middle of the desert. One person had taken a small piece of land, raked out the broken glass and old bleach bottles, added manure and created a small, earthly paradise. It captured my heart.

I helped Mr. Posey mix a potent fertilizer from chicken manure and water, a slurry that could be mixed with the irrigation water he pumped into the garden. I gathered the eggs. I milked the goats. I don’t remember many sweeter moments, in my life, than walking from my home to the goat pens in the cool early morning, smelling the creosote bushes, then the goats, then the sugary aroma of cracked corn and the warm, delicious odor of new milk. Sometimes we let the goats out into the open desert where they browsed blue gramma grass, mesquite beans and acacia leaves. I loved watching them shop among the plants for those they found most appetizing. The technical term for the way a goat eats is “browsing,” and it’s a perfectly accurate description. They are like shoppers in a supermarket, and even in the desert they seemed to find plenty of goods. While the goats were out of their pen and the gate left open, the chickens and guinea hens moved in and, scratching and clucking, found a feast of their own. I could never tell exactly what they were eating. They probably found scraps of grain and alfalfa, maybe tiny insects attracted by the animals and the manure.

From the chicken pen to the garden to the watermelon; from the mesquite beans to the goat’s udder to my breakfast cereal, I became an eye-witness to an alchemy that struck me then – and strikes me now – as magical.

I thought of Tim Posey as a sort of magician, a magus whose rituals of feed, fertilizer and irrigation catalyzed mystical transformations. I wanted to learn how to practice that magic.

Religions from the dawn of recorded history worshiped the sun. Solar energy is the source of all life. Petrochemicals are created from solar energy banked millions of years ago from plants that captured sunlight and photosynthesized useful carbohydrates. Plants died in oxygen-depleted water where they couldn’t decay, for lack of oxygen, and were eventually absorbed into the earth’s crust where over a long period of time the pressure and temperature transformed them into crude oil and natural gas. When you burn a piece of wood in the fireplace, you’re releasing solar energy stored by the tree. Our varied diets are basically made up of solar energy stored in a variety of forms – meat, vegetables, candy bars and fruit juice – by plants and animals who originally accumulated that energy for their own use.

The energy in oil, like the energy in corn, like the energy in Chicken McNuggets, like the energy in coal, originated in the sun.

And the sun keeps shining, showering the earth with useful energy. All living things benefit.

The first "green revolution" was inspired by industrial agriculture. We have, remarkably, found ways of feeding a human population that has expanded exponentially for hundreds of years.

A second “green revolution,” is sprouting now. In my newspaper on the morning I write this, the CEO of GE and the CEO of Wal-Mart are both featured, in separate stories, talking about their companies’ environmental policies. Who would have imagined, just 10 years ago, that the most powerful business leaders in the world would ever publicly proclaim their environmental concern? “Green” has evolved from a color, to a metaphor for fecundity, to a symbol for environmental health. Now we talk about “green” technologies and “greening” our homes. The word is a color, a verb and a noun denoting a certain kind of person. Marketers and politicians pragmatically discuss how to appeal to “the greens” – that is, people who are very concerned about protection of the environment.

The word, as an adjective, is used mainly to denote the negative. A “green” car is not a car that creates something, literally, “green.” Nor is it usually painted green. It’s a car that consumes less fuel and produces less pollution. A “green” house is not a house with a fine garden. It’s a house that uses less energy. Our various green initiatives – political, civic, social and corporate – moderate the damage we are doing. They don’t, generally, eliminate it.

So let’s say we created a sort of worldwide, per capita damage index where a person’s lifestyle was assigned a number that coincided with the environmental cost of that lifestyle. The number 1,000 symbolizes the most egregiously excessive lifestyle of the California trust-fund billionaire with seven enormous homes, two personal jets, eight children, a bunch of big cars, horses, yachts, you name it. The number 10 symbolizes the ascetic Tibetan monk growing enough food for his own simple diet of lentils and greens in the plot below his mountainside temple.

Everybody gets a positive number. Every human life (and any other kind of life for that matter) contributes, in at least a small measure, to the consumption of the planet’s resources. The Tibetan monk’s lifestyle is as “green” as a human lifestyle gets, but the monk’s net contribution to the world’s environmental problems is still a net subtraction.

The good news is, the miraculous biological machine we call the Earth is making more natural resources with each passing minute. We are, by the laws of nature, entitled to be here and a lot of us can live here as long as the temperature remains relatively stable and the atmosphere remains intact. We can live here because the sun keeps on showering energy on the planet – energy we convert into life. As life utilizes the sun’s energy it is broken down, gradually, into less and less energetic forms. The sun represents the most powerful physical entity in our realm of experience. We can conceptualize bigger stars, supernovas and black holes, but every morning our brightest beacon rises over the eastern horizon.

About 2,000 to 3,000 years ago monotheism emerged as humanity’s answer to the tribal conflicts that were consuming human lives and destroying natural resources. Over the course of a few centuries most of humanity converted to brand new systems of belief – either Judeo-Christian, Islamic or Buddhist. Among other benefits, monotheism allowed us to cooperate more successfully in larger groups. When every village had its own deities, the gods were always telling us to go kill the people over the hill so we could take their stuff. Monotheism helped us get past that. 

I believe that we are at another turning point and that the vision we need today is, at its root, a spiritual vision. Since we’re the only species that perceives its impact on the habitat, we have a sacred responsibility to protect it for our own sake as well as the sake of the biological system as a whole. The gospels of monotheism – Christian, Jewish and Moslem – place this “responsibility” on us, sometimes translated as “dominion.” Gradually, we are accepting this responsibility. If we are to fulfill our duty, we’re going to need a new vision of the future.

I think it’s time for us to start visualizing the future we desire. I’m not pretending it will be easy to get there.

I believe we have three tall mountains to climb.

Conservation is, indeed, the first - if smallest - mountain. We need to forestall the effects of global warming as much as possible while we get our act together. We’re on the lower slopes of the first mountain.

The next climb is longer and steeper. Population control is perfectly unavoidable. Eventually, we must control human population or we’ll make a mess of the habitat and then nature will exert the control we abdicated. I’m not advocating anything draconian, but if the international moral consensus were that each human being should reproduce himself or herself once – two children per couple – populations would begin slowly shrinking. It’s a simplistic solution, but the ultimate solutions are often the simplest.

After conservation, population is the second mountain we have to climb and we’ll have to negotiate some very difficult routes through social and political conflict to reach the top.

I’m optimistic that we’ll reach both these goals. We already have the tools we need to reduce per-capital consumption, and to control our population. That leaves the third, and tallest, mountain.

As our economies are now structured, we depend on population growth to support economic growth. If demand for all goods and services were shrinking, values of all goods and services would also be declining in our current models. Imagine a world in which demand for all the fundamental human necessities – food, shelter, etc. – were shrinking every year. Imagine a world in which, let’s say, 5 percent of all houses on the market had no buyers because fewer people lived in your city. We’ve never seen this and we probably don’t have the means of creating prosperity in a shrinking population. To sustain our population at lower, healthier levels, we’ll have to invent a human economy that creates prosperity without growth. We will need brand new economic tools.

If we are to form the global consensus we will need to support these sea-changes in human attitudes and culture, then we’ll have to visualize – as individuals and as a species – successful outcomes for all concerned. Otherwise, a lot of people just won’t share in the consensus and we won’t be successful. We need new systems in which no one is placed at an unfair disadvantage. I’m not talking about socialism, communism or any other obsolete social system. I think we’re looking for something new that rewards human innovation without requiring human expansion. Simply put, our new economic systems will require unprecedented cooperation across cultural, class and political barriers.

I think we have the tools to halt climate change and reduce the human population. But the economic tools we’ll need to secure our societies during a population reduction have yet to be invented.

Can we create economic tools that distribute the benefits of a healthy planet to all the planet’s human residents? Maybe not, but we’ll need to come pretty close to that if we’re to convince our global neighbors to join us in our effort to create a sustainable, healthy habitat for ourselves.

If we are to cooperate, as a species, in forming a positive vision for our future then the disenfranchised must be enfranchised. It’s a global problem whose solution must be a global consensus, or something very close to it.