Malthus was right. So read a car bumper sticker on a busy New Jersey highway the other day, and it got me thinking about the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English political economist who gave the "dismal science" its nickname. His "Essay on the Principle of Population," published in 1798, predicted a gloomy future for humanity: our population would grow until it reached the limits of our food supply, ensuring that poverty and famine would persistently rear their ugly faces to the world.

The most casual cruise on the Internet shows how much debate Malthus still stirs today. Basically, the Pollyannas of this world say that Malthus was wrong; the population has continued to grow, economies remain robust - and famines in Biafra and Ethiopia are more aberrations than signs of the future. Cassandras reply that Malthus was right, but techno-fixes have postponed the day of reckoning. There are now 6 billion people on Earth. The Pollyannas say the more the merrier; the Cassandras say that is already twice as many as can be supported in middle-class comfort, and the world is running out of arable land and fresh water. Despite a recent slowdown in the growth rate, the U.N. Population Division expects the world population to reach 9.5 billion by the year 2100.

What's missing from the debate is an understanding of the changing relationship between humanity and nature. For it is how humans fit into the natural world that will settle whether Malthus was right or wrong. He was wrong in 1798. But if he had been writing 10,000 years earlier, before agriculture, he would have been right. And were his book being published today, on the brink of the third millennium, he would be more right than wrong. Let me explain.

Malthus cared about only one species: ours. And, ecologically speaking, ours is an unusual species. With the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, we became the first species in the 3.7 billion-year history of life not to be living as small populations off the natural fat of the land. Taking food production into our own hands, we stepped outside the local ecosystem. All but a few cultivated plants became weeds, and all but a few domesticated herds, pets and game animals became pests and vermin. MORE>>

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