With more than 7 billion people in the world since 2011, and the recent release of JG Ballard’s apocalypic novel High Rise as a film, writers’ concerns about a population explosion were at even greater height more than 40 years ago
With the human population passing the 7 billion mark in 2011 and set to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, overpopulation is a hotly debated topic. Whether raising the issues of resource depletion or water shortage, migrant pressures or the growing threat of global epidemics, we are often implicitly asking if population is exerting an irreparable burden upon our environment.
It’s not an exclusively modern fear. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb (pdf), a cautionary tome warning that population management threatened to spiral out of control, creating scarcity, and that the answer lay in reducing global growth rate to zero. 1968 was also the year in which the Club of Rome was founded, with business leaders sponsoring MIT scientists to model future scenarios of resource deprivation and population growth.
Continue reading...via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1Nsq5yl
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