Critique of Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian theories.

"Malthus and his work" by James Bonar is a look into history. Bonar was a prominent figure in the British academic world, and he brought his expertise to the masses with this work. Written in an educational and informative way, this book is part fact and part fiction in a way that allows people a chance to truly live and understand the Napoleonic past.

Malthus has prepared in this work the general rules of political economy. He calls into question some of the reasonings of Ricardo and attempts to defend Adam Smith.

This anthology provides an historical overview of the scientific ideas behind environmental prediction and how, as predictions about environmental change have been taken more seriously and widely, they have affected politics, policy, and public perception. Through an array of texts and commentaries that examine the themes of progress, population, environment, biodiversity and sustainability from a global perspective, it explores the meaning of the future in the twenty-first century. Providing access and reference points to the origins and development of key disciplines and methods, it will encourage policy makers, professionals, and students to reflect on the roots of their own theories and practices.

This book is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence. Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus's Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas.

Thomas Robert Malthus's reputation has lately been rehabilitated in the fields of social biology, demography, environmentalism, and economics. In the midst of this current interest and with the chance to mark the occasion of the bicentenary of the first edition of the Essay on Population (1798), the contributors to this volume take this timely opportunity to examine the historical conditions in which Malthus constructed his theory, and in which the concept of a ‘Malthusian' and ‘Neo-Malthusian' philosophy first emerged. The essays redress the balance between Malthus's original argument, the immediate responses to Malthus by medics and theologians in Britain and on the Continent, and some of the ways that his ideas were later attacked, appropriated, or misrepresented. Included here are essays that not only re-evaluate the development of Malthus's theory, but also offer critical perspectives on the generation of the ‘Malthusian league' and debates about birth control in Britain and on the Continent, and Malthus's influence on the emergence of social science and Darwinian evolutionary biology.

Author of Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan now travels from West Africa to Southeast Asia to report on a world of disintegrating nation-states, warring nationalities, metastasizing populations, and dwindling resources. He emerges with a gritty tour de force of travel writing and political journalism. Whether he is walking through a shantytown in the Ivory Coast or a death camp in Cambodia, talking with refugees, border guards, or Iranian revolutionaries, Kaplan travels under the most arduous conditions and purveys the most startling truths. Intimate and intrepid, erudite and visceral, The Ends of the Earth is an unflinching look at the places and peoples that will make tomorrow's headlines--and the history of the next millennium. "Kaplan is an American master of...travel writing from hell...Pertinent and compelling."--New York Times Book Review "An impressive work. Most travel books seem trivial beside it."--Washington Post Book World

Thomas Robert Malthus's reputation has lately been rehabilitated in the fields of social biology, demography, environmentalism, and economics. In the midst of this current interest and with the chance to mark the occasion of the bicentenary of the first edition of the Essay on Population (1798), the contributors to this volume take this timely opportunity to examine the historical conditions in which Malthus constructed his theory, and in which the concept of a 'Malthusian' and 'Neo-Malthusian' philosophy first emerged. The essays redress the balance between Malthus's original argument, the immediate responses to Malthus by medics and theologians in Britain and on the Continent, and some of the ways that his ideas were later attacked, appropriated, or misrepresented. Included here are essays that not only re-evaluate the development of Malthus's theory, but also offer critical perspectives on the generation of the 'Malthusian league' and debates about birth control in Britain and on the Continent, and Malthus's influence on the emergence of social science and Darwinian evolutionary biology.

Featuring chapters from an international range of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook provides a collection of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that sheds new light on contemporary futures studies. Engaging with key defining questions of the early twenty-first century such as climate change, big data, AI, the future of economics, education, mental health, cities and more, the Handbook provides a review and synthesis of futures scholarship, highlighting the role that societies can and should play in their making. While the various chapters demonstrate how futures emerge and take shape in particular places at particular times, the distinctive insight provided by the volume overall is that futures thinking today must be social and contextual. By presenting a range of futures work from contexts around the globe, the Handbook contextualizes techniques – forecasting, backcasting, scenario planning, collaboration and co-production– to ask how different dimensions of the social are created and circulated in the process. Through its thirty chapters, the volume explores and interrogates narratives, anticipations, enactments, ecologies, collaborations, prospections and so on to highlight which versions of the social are legitimized and which are encouraged and foreclosed. This Handbook opens an important conversation about the centrality of the social in futures thinking. By bringing arts, humanities and social sciences scholars and practitioners into conversation with biologists, environmental, climate and computer scientists, this volume seeks to encourage new pathways across, between and within multiple disciplines to interrogate the futures we need and want. The social must be our starting point if we are to steer our planet in a direction that supports good lives for the many, everywhere.

The concept of sustainability lies at the core of the challenge of environment and development, and the way governments, business and environmental groups respond to it. Green Development provides a clear and coherent analysis of sustainable development in both theory and practice. Green Development explores the origins and evolution of mainstream thinking about sustainable development and offers a critique of the ideas behind them. It draws a link between theory and practice by discussing the nature of the environmental degradation and the impacts of development. It argues that, ultimately, ‘green’ development has to be about political economy, about the distribution of power, and not about environmental quality. Its focus is strongly on the developing world. The fourth edition retains the broad structure of previous editions, but has been updated to reflect advances in ideas and changes in international policy. Greater attention has been given to the political ecology of development, market-based and neoliberal environmentalism, and degrowth. This fully revised edition discusses: the origins of thinking about sustainability and sustainable development, and its evolution to the present day; the ideas that dominate mainstream sustainable development (including natural capital, the green economy, market environmentalism and ecological modernisation); critiques of mainstream ideas and of neoliberal framings of sustainability, and alternative ideas about sustainability that challenge ‘business as usual’ thinking, such as arguments about limits to growth and calls for degrowth; the dilemmas of sustainability in the context of forests, desertification, food and farming, biodiversity conservation and dam construction; the challenge of policy choices about sustainability, particularly between reformist and radical responses to the contemporary global dilemmas. Green Development offers clear insights into the challenges of environmental sustainability, and social and economic development. It is unique in offering a synthesis of theoretical ideas on sustainability and in its coverage of the extensive literature on environment and development around the world. The book has proved its value to generations of students as an authoritative, thought-provoking and readable guide to the field of sustainable development.