Malthus Explains Obama

Dear Mr. President,

In his article “Malthus and Seven Billion” (Left Curve, No. 36), Ronald Bleier corrects the persistent misinterpretation of Malthus’s “prediction” that humanity will collapse because the planet cannot sustain exponential population growth. Malthus actually postulated that humans would always be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery due to the tendency of population to grow faster than food supplies and that this oscillation was ongoing, not an event that would take place at some point in the future. Bleier was searching for an explanation of the causes of conflict and found one in Malthus’s analysis of the fall of the Roman Empire which he attributed to “want” [scarcity] that drove the Barbarian hordes down from the North “like famished wolves in search of prey.” On October 31, the UN estimated the world’s population hit 7 billion and we are now adding a billion people to the planet every 14–15 years. Two things occurred to me as I read this. First, “want” is not restricted to food but includes all resources. In today’s America the insatiable demand for oil replaces food as the driving factor. We have visited misery upon the peoples of the Middle East for over 60 years in our insatiable quest for oil. It has made many rich and happy but far more poor and miserable. It was the underlying cause of the first Gulf War, the hatred behind the 9/11 attacks that resulted in Iraq, Afghanistan and now your drone wars spreading across the globe. It explains your opening the Arctic and vast stretches along both coasts to drilling as well as the resumption of deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and your approval of one leg of the XL pipeline, all with the full knowledge that environmental disasters will follow. Fracking fouls water supplies, deepwater drilling destroys entire ecosystems and the continued reliance on oil guarantees the coming cataclysm of global warming. Which brings me to the second point: your failure to address global warming, another broken campaign promise. Global weather patterns are shifting, natural catastrophes are becoming more severe and with the tipping point perhaps already passed, you remain silent and unengaged. However, the environment cannot be ignored forever and the cost in human misery will be enormous. The coming wars will be not over oil but water, the new scarce resource and far more basic to life on this planet than oil. Your legacy, Mr. President. Not something to be proud of.