IT BEGINS WITH HATING HUMANS:

The sad decline of David Attenborough: How can someone who once commissioned The Ascent of Man now churn out such human-hating parables? (Rob Lyons, 12/11/09, spiked)

[F]ar from opening our eyes to a major new problem, Attenborough merely parrots the anti-human spirit of our times. It is Attenborough’s view of humanity, not humanity itself, which is toxic. Moreover, the logical upshot of his belief that humanity is wrecking the planet is for people to be stopped from having children, not merely by gentle persuasion, but by force if necessary, as people in China have discovered to their cost. [...]

[A]ttenborough argues that the Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ for humans is dependent on how well we want to live. If we all live like the average Rwandan, the Earth could support 18billion people; live like the average Indian and that capacity falls to 15billion. But if we want to enjoy the living standards of the average American, then the Earth can only support 1.5billion. Using the examples of water, food and fossil fuels, there are simply not enough resources to use, nor ‘sinks’ to dump our waste into, to support any more people.

Attenborough seems like a thoughtful and sincere man, but like all the arguments put forward by neo-Malthusians, this is errant nonsense. He quotes approvingly from Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, which argued that population will always run ahead of the means to support it, an imbalance that would ultimately be corrected by nature itself through starvation. But Malthus has been proven utterly wrong so often it is embarrassing that intelligent people should still endorse him.

Despite what Attenborough says, the case against Malthus was even made, unwittingly, in his own Horizon film. Attenborough shows that while food production will need to double over the next 40 years to feed a bigger and wealthier population, the industrialised world has in the past trebled production through the use of fertilisers and machinery. The ‘green revolution’ of the Fifties and Sixties, led by the agronomist Norman Borlaug, increased agricultural output fivefold in just a few short years in many countries. Simply applying the best techniques available now to the whole world would come close to solving the problem, while emerging techniques could make farming even more productive. In other words, the food crisis, like the water crisis and the energy crisis, is really a social problem of poverty and development, not natural limits.