So, when he wrote 200 years ago, Malthus was wrong. He did not see that nations are not like ecosystems, that people could expand into new regions and, with the burgeoning technology of the Industrial Revolution, become vastly more efficient at producing food and wresting raw materials from Earth.

But something else is going on, and I think Malthus may have sensed it coming. As long ago as 1679, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (the Dutch inventor of the microscope) speculated that the limit to the human population would be on the order of 13 billion - remarkably close to many current estimates. For our position in the natural world is once again undergoing a sea change. We are not the first nor are we the only species to spread around the globe, but we are the first to do so as an integrated economic entity. Other species maintain tenuous genetic connections, but no direct ecological connections, among their far-flung members. We, in contrast, are exchanging more than $1 trillion of goods and services among ourselves globally every day.

This means that in an economic - if not a political - sense, we have become a single, enormous population. The system in which we are living, extracting our energy and other supplies, is global: the totality of Earth's atmosphere, its waters, its soils and crust, and all its living things. This is the sum total of all the world's local ecosystems - ecosystems we have allowed to decay as we have chosen (quite successfully!) to live outside them. MORE>>

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