The Post War Intellectual Roots of the Population Bomb - Fairfield Osborns Our Plundered Planet and William Vogts Road to Survival in Retrospect

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© Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development

Te Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2009) 1(3)

Te Post War Intellectual Roots o the Population Bomb.Faireld Osborn’s ‘Our Plundered Planet’ and William

Vogt’s ‘Road to Survival’ in Retrospect

Pierre Desrochers* and Christine Hofauer†

*Pierre Desrochers is Associate Proessor o Geography at the University o oronto.

†Christine Hoauer is a Master’s student at the same university.

Email: pierre.desrochers=a= utoronto.ca (replace =a= with @)

Abstract

Tis paper traces the “intellectual roots” o Te Popula-tion Bomb by discussing two now largely orgotten best-sellers, Faireld Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and

William Vogt’s Road to Surial . Tese books launcheda Malthusian revival in the post War era and prooundlyinuenced a young Paul Ehrlich, whose own best-sellerepitomised this movement, both in content and rhet-orical style. Our paper is structured as ollows. We rstdiscuss the traditional opposition between so-calledMalthusians and Cornucopians. Tis is ollowed by anoverview o Osborn and Vogt’s lie and work, and a moredetailed survey o their basic arguments on environmen-tal destruction, population growth, economic develop-ment, technological change and the basic institutions o a market economy. A review o reactions to both booksupon their publication ollows. Our concluding thoughtis that, at the time o writing Te Population Bomb, Pauland Anne Ehrlich should have been more cautious andrevised their tone and rhetoric, in light o the undeniableand already apparent errors and shortcomings o Osborn

and Vogt’s analyses.

“Both [Osborn and Vogt] are barking up the righttree. Tey have put their nger on the soil and

water robber. Tis robber is an economic and busi-ness system which makes it protable to destroythe elements that give us our ood, our clothes, ourhouses and our gadgets – and, o course, ultimately

ourselves.”Angus McDonald, , p.

“Te postwar population explosion hysteria ini-

tiated by Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendell in, injected by Burch and Vogt into the body o Faireld Osborn’s benignly intentioned books onnatural conservation, and carried to ull intellec-tual ruition by the Paddocks, Ehrlich and Hardin,succeeded ar beyond the wildest hopes o the old-time eugenicists who started it all. Out o it camenot only mass movements, such as Zero Popula-tion Growth, Inc., with chapters o active membersin many American cities, but also new causes orolder conservationist societies, such as the vener-able Sierra Club.”

Allan Chase, , p.

Introduction

Suggesting that the ‘population bomb’ had already goneo, Paul Ehrlich amously began the rst chapter o hisbest-seller by saying that i he had long understood the

population explosion “intellectually,” he had come to

understand it “emotionally one stinking hot night inDelhi a ew years ago” (Ehrlich , p. ). Te purposeo mentioning his now inamous Indian trip and otherdirect experiences, such as the caterpillars that, as a childhe was unable to nurture into butteries due to DDspraying on local oliage, is obvious; he needed to providehis target audience, the American readership, with capti-

vating examples o the ate they would inevitably suerunless they drastically curtailed population growth intheir own country. Te act that Te Population Bomb sold over three million copies by is a testament to

Paul and his wie Anne’s capacity to reach out and toucha broad audience.

What is less well remembered today about the



The PosT War InTell ecTual rooTs of The PoPulaTIon BomB

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Ehrlichs’s early contribution is the context in whichtheir ‘intellectual’ understanding o the alleged social,economic and environmental impacts o populationgrowth came about. Despite a now widespread popular

perception that theirs was a pioneering or innovative

work,

Te Population Bomb is actually best understoodas “climaxing and in a sense terminating the debate o the s and s” (Luten , p. ). As Rubin(, p. ) observed, the book originally drew littleattention or “throughout the sixties, it appears thateverybody was concerned about overpopulation” andits basic arguments were by then “amiliar” as theyhad been vigorously promoted in previous decades byseveral population control and environmental activists.For example, the expressions “population bomb” and“population explosion” were rst introduced in the early

s by the businessman and population control activ-ist Hugh Everett Moore () in a twenty-two page

pamphlet similarly titled “Te Population Bomb!” thatby had gone through thirteen editions and a printrun o nearly a million and a hal copies (Kasun ;Robertson ). Several individuals borrowed Moore’stitle in their own writings. Among the most prominent

were the Commissioner o the United States Bureau o Reclamation Michael W. Straus (, p. ) who used itin his book Why Not Surie? ; the Stanord proessor o chemistry J. Murray Luck (, p. ) who discussedthe concept in a presidential address on “Man againsthis Environment” delivered beore the Pacic Divisiono the American Association or the Advancement o Science in that was later published in Science; andthe director o the Population Reerence Bureau RobertC. Cook () who authored an article with this titlein the Bulletin o the Atomic Scientists. Te expression“population explosion” was or its part so widely usedthat it even graced the cover page o a issue o imemagazine (gure ). Not surprisingly in an age where A-

and H-bombs were on everyone’s minds, several authorsalso reerred to the “P-bomb” (Slick ; roebst ;Fabre-Luce ).

Radical prescriptions to cure the alleged threat o overpopulation were also common beore the Ehrlichshad any popular impact on the issue. For example, one

year beore the publication o the couple’s best-seller,the brothers William and Paul Paddock’s () in theirbook Famine 1975! promoted the creation o a triagesystem in which the least t individuals in countries suchas India, Egypt and Haiti would be allowed to starve in

order to save the more robust ones. While ew writerssupported such extreme measures, the dominant per-spective on population and environmental issues had by

then become highly pessimistic. Milliman (, p. )summarized it as ollows ve years beore the Ehrlichs’sbook: “) Natural resources are disappearing rapidly; )this disappearance is totally undesirable; ) the majorreason or this disappearance is the greed o individuals

pursuing selsh and prot motives; ) the result is thatthe well-being o posterity is being sacriced or the sat-isaction o the whims o present generations.”

Te institutional origins, outlook, and educationaleorts o the immediate post World War II era envi-ronmental and population writers and activists whoshaped the worldview o the Ehrlichs and other promi-nent s writers, however, are now largely orgottenor judged inconsequential. ypical in this respect isthe population economist Julian Simon (, ix) whoobserves that, apart rom “a brie double ip-op” by theeconomist John Maynard Keynes, “not much o note”

happened in the eld o population economics betweenthe contributions o Marx and Engels and those pub-lished in the s. As the historian Tomas B. Rob-ertson (, pp. –) perceptively observes: “Althoughone can hardly pick up an environmental book romthe late s and early s that does not warn aboutoverpopulation, it is surprisingly easy to nd a historyo the movement that barely mentions overpopulation”and emphasizes instead actors ranging rom the searchor better environmental amenities (clear rivers, clean airand more green spaces and parks) and the destruction

associated with suburban sprawl to pesticide use, nuclear weapons and the rise o ecological science. “Indeed,” thehistorian adds, “Malthusianism has received nothing like

Figure 1 Cover of Time Magazine, January 11 1960

Source: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19600111,00.html



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the attention given (deservedly) to [these] other majorissues.”

Yet, the debate on population was really reignited, in, with the publication o two international best-sell-ers: Faireld Osborn’sOur Plundered Planet and William

Vogt’s Road to Surial .

Following important promo-tional eorts that included selections in popular bookclubs, Our Plundered Planet had already been reprintedeight times by the end o its year o publication and waseventually translated into thirteen languages. For its part,

Vogt’s book was translated into nine languages while acondensed version (eventually translated into elevenlanguages) was published in Readers’ Digest . According to one estimate, it eventually reached between twentyand thirty million individuals and was the biggest envi-ronmental best-seller o all time until the publication o

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in (Linnér , p. ),besides being the most important source o inspirationor Moore’s () Population Bomb! Te great Frenchdemographer Alred Sauvy (, p. ) compared itsimpact to Malthus’ work, while his colleague Jean Sutter(, p. ) observed that it launched a worldwide dis-cussion on population control. According to the econo-mist Erich Zimmermann (, pp. –), both booksreached “literally millions” and le “their mark on theminds o many throughout the world.” Although neithercontained much that some expert had not already said,they presented or the rst time “a certain holistic all-embracing, all-coordinating approach that reveals the

woods where other experts pointed to single trees,” and possessed “an eloquence born o evangelistic zeal that ewexperts can muster” (idem).

In the words o Chase (, p. ), “out o Te Road to Surial and its many literary and intellectual descend-ants” were to come Zero Population Growth as well as anumber o other popular movements, along with “someo the most pervasive slogans o modern America.”

Because both Osborn’s and Vogt’s books soon becamemandatory readings in several institutions o highereducation, a “whole generation o impressionable young

people were to come under [their] inuence… during their most ormative years. One o them was a resh-man at the University o Pennsylvania, Paul R. Ehrlich”(idem). Interestingly, while Ehrlich “traced his own Mal-thusian belies to a lecture he heard Vogt give when he

was attending college in the early s” (Jamison andEyerman , p. ), it was ultimately Osborn’s ratherthan Vogt’s book that was listed in his best-seller’s bibli-

ography, perhaps because, as will be demonstrated laterin this essay, it showed less contempt or human lie. ForEhrlich, these writers provided “a global ramework or

things he had observed as a young naturalist” (Horowitz, p. ).

Despite a ew more in-depth treatments in broaderhistories o the population control and environmental-ist movements (Allen ; Linnér ; Robertson

; Schlosser orthcoming), reerences to these booksare now usually limited to a ew paragraphs or ootnotesin much larger volumes or are simply not mentioned inotherwise well-documented discussions o the historyo modern eco-catastrophism (Bailey ). Tey werenonetheless undamental in terms o shaping the issues,outlook, and rhetorical style o later writers and activ-ists such as Al Gore who was introduced to these writers

while attending a class on “Teology and the Natural Sci-ences” at Vanderbilt University (Cockburn and St. Clair). Indeed, as Chase (, p. ) observed, “or the

next three decades, every argument, every concept, everyrecommendation made in Te Road to Surial wouldbecome integral to the conventional wisdom o the

post-Hiroshima generation o educated Americans,” astatement which remains true to this day i one excludesconcerns related to human-induced climate change.

Te purpose o this essay is to introduce twenty-rstcentury readers to the now largely orgotten best-sellers o Osborn and Vogt, in the process making animplicit case that the birth o the modern environmen-talist movement, including the intellectual roots o Te

Population Bomb, can actually be traced to the immedi-ate post World War II “overpopulation” concerns ratherthan to other, less signicant, issues. It is structured asollows: Te rst section discusses briey the traditionalopposition between so-called Malthusians and Cornu-copians. Tis is ollowed by an overview o Osborn’s and

Vogt’s lie and work, and a more detailed survey o theirbasic arguments and rhetoric on environmental destruc-tion, population growth, economic development, tech-nological change and the basic institutions o a market

economy. A review o reactions to Road to Surial andOur Plundered Planet is next. Our concluding thoughtis that Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s tone and rhetoric shouldhave been considerably more cautious in light o theundeniable and already apparent errors and shortcom-ings o Osborn’s and Vogt’s analysis at the time they

wrote Te Population Bomb.

. Malthusians and Cornucopians

Basic concerns regarding resource availability andanthropogenic environmental degradation are at leastas old as civilization (Lowenthal ; Simon ;




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Spengler ; ainter , ). In the words o the then prominent economist Alred Marshall (,book IV, ch IV, paragraph ): “Te study o the growth o

population is oen spoken o as though it were a modernone. But in a more or less vague orm it has occupied

the attention o thoughtul men in all ages o the world.”As Luten (, p. ) later observed, “the question o limits to growth and optimism and pessimism regard-ing the human prospect [has been] debated [in the lasttwo centuries] without consensus” with interest in theissue “wax[ing] and wan[ing] more times than can becounted.”

On the one hand, writers such as Conucius, Platoand Aristotle anticipated modern concerns, perspectivesand concepts ranging rom growth-induced depletiono soils, minerals and biomass resources to “ecological

balance” and “steady-state economics.” Best remem-bered today, o course, is the rst edition o the Englisheconomist Tomas Robert Malthus’ (–) Essayon the Principle o Population () whose contributionis typically (and somewhat unairly in light o his later

writings) summarized as stating that natural checks, suchas limited ood production capabilities, will inevitablyresult in amines and wars, which will in turn reduce

population sizes to much smaller and ultimately moresustainable levels.

On the other hand, some analysts viewed a growing population as a generally positive thing, as it providedmore arms to work and more heads to create new solu-tions (Simon ; Slocombe ). While their social

philosophy spanned the political spectrum, they even-tually came to be labeled ‘cornucopian’ by allusion tothe mythical Greek “horn o plenty” (cornucopia). Forexample, the British political economist William Petty(, p. ) wrote in : “[I]t is more likely that oneingenious curious man may rather be ound out amongst,, than persons.” Friedrich Engels (,

non-paginated) observed that the “productive power atmankind’s disposal is immeasurable. Te productivity o the soil can be increased ad innitum by the applicationo capital, labour and science.” Another long-standing critique o the Malthusian outlook is its general disre-gard or the value o (most) human lie. In the words o the French mutualist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon(, pp. –), it is nothing short o “the theory o pol-itical murder; o murder rom motives o philanthropyand or love o God”. While Malthusians “act in goodaith and rom the best intentions in the world” and “ask

nothing better than to make the human race happy,” they“cannot conceive how, without some sort o an organ-ization o homicide, a balance between population and

production can exist” (idem).During most o the nineteenth century, the opening o

new territories, technological developments and increas-ingly large levels o international trade convincinglydisproved the most apocalyptic scenarios, at least rom

a trans-Atlantic perspective (De Steiguer ; Foster). As a result, the Malthusian doctrine was “almostuniversally rejected” by American thinkers at the turn o the twentieth century (Ekirch , p. ), although this

was much less the case in Great Britain (Robertson ;). In the words o the US politician John J. Ingalls,it was “a curious act that with increasing population,creating increased demands, all products o the eld andarm have diminished in value, and that with the exhaus-tion o the public domain arming lands have becomemore and more unsaleable” (quoted by ourgee , p.

). As another contemporary American observer put it:

“Te time may come, to be sure, when the Malthu-sian theory will be revived, but it is not in our day,nor will it be in our century, or scientic thoughtalmost completely overturned the theory and hasrelieved it o its strength in exciting the ears o economists or o philosophers that the world wasgradually but surely coming to that position whereit could not supply its population with ood, andthat some method o checking population mustbe the resort. Te broadening o the area o supplythrough discovery and the taking up o vast tractso land were the immediate means o depriving thedoctrine o its orce, but later on intensive agricul-ture and the discoveries o science succeeded inrelegating the theory to the past.” (Wright ,

p. )

In later decades, orthodox Marxists (Perelman ),optimistic economists (Zimmermann ; Simon ;

Bradley ) and other writers, the most inuentialin terms o reaching a broad American audience beorethe publication o Osborn and Vogt’s best-sellers being

perhaps the Harvard geologist Kirtley Fletcher Mather() with his short book Enough and to Spare, would

present various versions o the Cornucopian perspective. While resource availability was the traditional

concern o [neo] Malthusians, some nineteenth century writers also emphasized the social and economic con-sequences o ecological degradation. For example, aerlamenting the environmental destruction and alleged

resulting civilizational collapse o ancient Persia, Egyptand Mesopotamia, the natural historian Felix LeopoldOswald (, pp. –) observed that the “physical



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laws o God can not be outraged with impunity,” thatthere were “some sins against which not one o the Scrip-tural codes o the East contains a word o warning” andthat the “destruction o orests is such a sin, and its sig-nicance is preached by every desolate country on the

surace o this planet.” Te English author and Churcho England priest Mark Pattison () observed or his part that he had simply “to utter the atal phrase, ‘sani-tary arrangements,’” to remind his readers o how “nextto nothing” had been done “to remedy the overgrowing

pollution o earth, air, and water by our teeming popula-tion” despite much eort on this issue.

In the last quarter o the nineteenth century, individ-uals later labelled ‘conservationists’ began to promotethe notion that private interests were mismanaging American resources on a large scale and that the best

way “o eliminating waste in natural resource use [was]through government intervention” (Mason , p.). Tis movement gained much political tractionthrough President Teodore Roosevelt’s Govern-ors’ Conerence; a gathering convened to “prevent theadvent o a woodless age, and deer as long as possible theadvent o an ironless age” (Roosevelt quoted by Nolan, p. ). Te dominant perspective at this meeting

was summed up as ollows by Frederick Winslow aylor(, non-paginated) in the introduction to his best-selling Principles o Scientic Management : “We can seeour orests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste,our soil being carried by oods into the sea; and the endo our coal and our iron is in sight.” Te next year, thePresident o the New York Zoological Society (and Fair-eld Osborn’s ather) Henry Faireld Osborn similarlyobserved that, with the exception o conservation areas,nowhere was “nature being destroyed so rapidly as in theUnited States.” As he put it, not only did “vulgar adver-tisements hide the landscape,” but “air and water are pol-luted, rivers and streams serve as sewers and dumping

grounds, orests are swept away and shes are drivenrom the streams. Many birds are becoming extinct, andcertain mammals are on the verge o extermination.”

It is probably air to say, however, that it was not untilthe publication o Osborn’s and Vogt’s books that a Mal-thusian revival took hold o a signicant segment o theAmerican population. As the historian Samuel P. Hays(, pp. –) observed a decade aer their original

publication:

“[On] the whole the atmosphere o the years since

World War II has shied, I believe, rom optimismto a guarded pessimism. We think less o possibili-ties and more o limits; we think less in terms o

human betterment, and more in terms o humansurvival. Te unlimited horizons o technology areless oen in our minds today than the compulsiveuse o technology in a race toward world suicide.Tis new emphasis appeared soon aer World War

II in two popular books, William Vogt’s Road toSurial and Faireld Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet , both o them inused with Malthusian pes-simism, both emphasizing the enormous problemo population growth and the world’s limited oodsupply. Both warned that technology was notenough; resources were not unlimited; the pressureo population itsel must be reduced. Te increas-ing emphasis on national security augmented thissense o the limits, rather than o the opportunitieso resources, o the need to husband rather than to

develop, o the need to stockpile and save.”

. Biographies and backgrounds

Lie and work

William Vogt was born on May , , in Minneola,New York. Aer graduating with honors in romSt. Stephens (now Bard) College, he was, among otherthings, an early opponent o marshland drainage ormosquito control and later assumed a series o posi-tions that gave him the opportunity to urther pursuehis interests in birds and the environment. In , theocus o his career shied rom studying animals to man,

when as Associate Director o the Division o Scienceand Education o the Ofce o the Coordinator in Inter-American Aairs, and then with his appointment asChie o the Conservation Section o the Pan AmericanUnion, he was given the opportunity to study the rela-tionship between climate, population and resources, as

well as directly observe the devastating and widespread poverty o various Latin American countries. Teseexperiences ormed the background to the perspectivehe later elaborated on in his Road to Surial , a bookmotivated by his strong belie that then-current trendsin ertility and economic growth were rapidly destroying the environment and undermining the quality o lie o uture generations. Vogt’s most signicant contribution

was to link environmental and perceived overpopulation problems, warning in no uncertain terms that currenttrends would deliver uture wars, hunger, disease and

civilizational collapse.Te publication o the Road to Surial soon provided

Vogt with the credibility to contribute to population




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debates in various high prole roles. From to ,he served as a National Director o the Planned Parent-hood Federation o America. In , he became theSecretary o the Conservation Foundation, and until hislast days, served as a representative o the International

Union or the Conservation o Nature and NaturalResources to the United Nations. Upon his death on July , , he was remembered or the provocativequestions he had dared to ask and or tackling a subjectmatter that remained shrouded in controversy.

For his part, Henry Faireld Osborn Jr. was bornon January , , in Princeton, New Jersey. Writing under the name Faireld Osborn and known as “Fair”to his riends, he was part o the wealthy and inuentialOsborn clan and the son o Henry Faireld Osborn, a

prominent paleontologist, eugenicist and “distinguished

Aryan enthusiast” (Gibson , p. ). Osborn Jr.originally became interested in science aer accompany-ing his ather on eld trips throughout his youth. Aerobtaining his Bachelor o Arts rom Princeton Univer-sity, he went on to study biology at Cambridge Univer-sity, but then pursued a career in international business.owards the end o the First World War, he ser ved brieyas a Captain in the United States Army, aer which hereturned to private enterprise. In , he retired anddevoted himsel to environmental causes. He continuedin his capacity as secretary and board member o theNew York Zoological Society, a position he held rom until , when he was named president and boardmember, a position he held or the rest o his lie.

Like Vogt, Osborn’s public prole increased dramati-cally with the publication o Our Plundered Planet . He isalso remembered or being an early opponent o synthetic

pesticide use, or producing several lms dealing withendangered species, ood control and water resources, as

well as or his second book, Te Limits o the Earth (),and a collection o short essays he edited under the title o

Our Crowded Planet (). From to , he servedas the rst president o the Conservation Foundation, anorganization he ounded with a number o like-mindedcolleagues to raise awareness about ecological problems.Upon retiring as president, he served as chairman o theboard o this organization rom to . From to , Osborn was also a member o the ConservationAdvisory Committee or the U.S. Department o theInterior, while simultaneously serving on the Planning Committee o the Economic and Social Council o theUnited Nations. In , he helped establish the Institute

or Research in Animal Behavior. Upon his death in NewYork City on September th, , he was rememberedor playing a valuable role in a number o conservation

organizations and or his outreach initiatives to warn o the dangers o uncontrolled population growth and to

promote responsible natural resource consumption.

Despite coming rom very dierent backgrounds, Vogt and Osborn became inextricably linked by the

commonality o their work and recognized the benetso working together to achieve their shared goals.

‘Proto-environmentalist’ Inuences16

While Vogt and Osborn’s books were important inuen-ces on the development o later environmental thought,they were, like uture generations o environmentalactivists, part o a long lineage that could be traced backto Malthus, his predecessors and his intellectual progeny,

as well as writers and activists such as Ralph WaldoEmerson, Henry Toreau, George Perkins Marsh, JohnMuir, Giord Pinchot and Aldo Leopold. Both menclaimed similar mentors, riends and intellectual rame-

works, as well as o having been inspired by books suchas Guy I. Burch and Elmer Pendell’s overpopulation tract

Population Roads to Peace or War () and Paul Sears’analysis o dust bowls in Deserts on the March ().Also notable was G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte’s ()Te Rape o the Earth: A World Surey o Soil Erosion, a synthesis o a large literature that essentially blamedunsophisticated cultivators or initiating a cycle o orestclearance, shiing agriculture, and the creation o grass-lands through repeated burning, which eventually ledto widespread soil erosion and exhaustion, ultimatelyresulting in desertication.

Another important strand o policy writings was thegame-management literature o the s that docu-mented and discussed early and well-publicized conserv-ation experiments, such as in the Kaibab orest on thenorth rim o the Grand Canyon, where ecosystems col-

lapsed due to a population explosion o herbivores that were no longer kept in check aer their predators hadbeen systematically removed (McCormick ; ).

Various New Deal initiatives in the public planning o land use and restoration, such as the creation o theennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian ConservationCorps and various policies to address the “dust bowls” o the time, were also inuential on their thinking.

Osborn and Vogt’s intellectual outlooks, however, were ormed not only by Conservation thinking andNew Deal experiments, but also by one o the most

inuential movements o the rst hal o the twentiethcentury, eugenics.




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Eugenics

In his classic Te Republic , written in about B.C.,Plato suggested that improving society was in and o itsel insufcient without the development o what

would later be known as ‘genetically improved’ humanbeings. Modern ‘eugenics’ (in Greek, ‘good breeding’) would be ounded on this premise by Sir Francis Galtonin his book, Inquiries into Human Nature, in whichhe argued on behal o improving human populations’intelligence, cultural talents, physical strength and dex-terity, which he thought to some extent ‘breedable.’More importantly, Galton believed that mankind wasbeginning to interere with the mechanisms o naturalselection through improved public health measuresand, as a result, that coercive approaches were required

to stave o its perceived deterioration and improve itschances o survival. In short, while Darwin importedconcepts rom the eld o economics and applied themto biology, his cousin Francis Galton proposed that con-cepts rom biology could orm the basis o social engi-neering policies.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies, eugenicists were eager to transorm their move-ment rom a purely academic exercise to a practical onethrough the creation o numerous academic and policyorganizations in order to legitimize their science andto lobby governments to implement policies consis-tent with their theories. While it is beyond the scopeo this paper to look into the history o this move-ment, a brie overview o some remarks made in byOsborn’s ather, Henry Faireld Osborn, is instructive interms o understanding the growing afnities betweeneugenicists and conservationists. Te older Osborn rstobserved that eugenics was a “long known and universallaw, namely the survival o the ttest and elimination o the unttest” (quoted by Gibson , p. ). Attention

to this natural law was made mandatory by numerouscrises, chie among which were ‘over-population’ andthe “over-destruction o natural resources, now actu-ally world-wide” (idem). Te solution, not surprisingly,

was “prolonged and intelligent and humane birth selec-tion aided by humane birth control” (idem). In the end,sufce it to say that the ‘practical excesses’ that it inspiredin Nazi Germany’s “centers o applied eugenics” (Chase, p. ) such as Auschwitz, delivered a major blowto both the eld and humanity itsel.

In the years ollowing the Second World War, new

technologies and medications developed to reduce mor-tality in environments ranging rom tropical islands tomosquito inected marshlands in temperate countries

were about to be exported to less developed regions, virtually guaranteeing a new burst o population growththat would contribute signicantly to the large numbersalready added in the wake o the Industrial Revolutionand nineteenth century globalization (Kasun ).

Some leaders o the eugenics movement seized on thesedevelopments to regain some legitimacy and, in the words o one critic, soon developed “a new package wrapper or their old bill o goods” (Chase , p. ),i.e., the unsustainable demands these new mouths wouldsoon place on already rapidly depleting natural resourcesand amenities. Osborn Jr. and Vogt, both previouslyinvolved in the eugenics movement, would pioneer thedevelopment o what would later be reerred to as “neo-Malthusian ecology” (Foster ). Te eugenics rootso modern environmentalism, however, would quickly

(and conveniently) be orgotten in later years, despitethe act that any writing or movement that sprang romsuch a lineage should have been examined careully.

With these considerations in mind, we now turn to abrie summary o Osborn’s and Vogt’s rhetoric and keyarguments.

3. Scope and urgency o environmental crisis inOsborn’s and Vogt’s work

Neither Vogt nor Osborn needed a picture o the Earthrom space to describe a nite and increasingly ragile

planet that was being ransacked by an ever increasing number o (i only temporarily wealthier) human beings.In Osborn’s (p. ) words, “so it is that the earth is con-stantly becoming smaller, or rather our knowledge o itis leading us to think o it as diminishing rapidly, which,aer all, amounts to one and the same thing.” Vogt(p. ) echoed this sentiment, writing that humanityormed “an earth-company, and the lot o the Indiana

armer can no longer be isolated rom that o the Bantu,”a act that was true not only in a “mystical” brotherhood-like sense where the suering o starving babies hal-wayaround the world should concern Americans, but “ina direct, physical sense” as environmental degradationon the other side o the globe ultimately aected theliving standards o citizens located in the most advancedeconomies.

Osborn

Osborn’s underlying premise was that human beingshad allowed themselves to be blindsided by their own




accomplishments, and were unaware o the true extent o the damage inicted on the planet in the process. Evenspecialists in a wide range o disciplines – rom agron-omy, biology and chemistry to politics and economics– while amiliar with specic issues within the connes

o their own expertise, lacked the necessary global per-spective to ully appreciate the scope o the catastrophe.As such, it was “amazing how ar one has to travel to nda person, even among those most widely inormed, whois aware o the processes o mounting destruction that weare inicting upon our lie sources” (p. ). So damag-ing was this widespread phenomenon that he deemed it“eventually [more] deadly” than the Second World War(p. vii), or “man’s destructiveness has turned not onlyupon himsel but upon his own good earth – the well-spring o lie” (p. ).

O course, humanity’s misuse o the land dated backto the “earliest periods o human history” (p. ), leaving in its wake a “very large proportion o the originallyhabitable areas” already so misused that it was “sterile,barren [and] beyond reclamation” (p. ). Recent actso destruction, however, were unsurpassed in scale, andit had “been estimated that there has been a greater losso productive soil in the last ew decades than the accu-mulated loss in all previous time” (p. ). Even recentaccomplishments in the world’s agricultural superpower,the United States, was one “great illusion” or the “storyo our nation in the last century as regards the use o orests, grasslands, wildlie and water sources is the most

violent and the most destructive o any written in thelong history o civilization” (p. ). It was thereoreutile to cling “to the eeling [that] there must be somecontinent where the relationship between man andnature is not out o balance” (p. ). In this context,man’s “avoidance o the day o atonement that is drawing nearer as each year passes” implied that he had to quicklylearn “to work with nature in understanding rather than

in conict” (p. ). Failure to change would not only“point to widespread misery such as human beings havenot yet experienced,” it would also, in the end, threaten“even man’s very survival” (p. ix). Humanity had “nowarrived at the day when the books should be balanced”(p. ).

Vogt

Vogt’s thesis was perhaps expressed most concisely by the

inuential nancier and political advisor Bernard Baruchin his oreword to Road to Surial : “Because o the greatabundance o the earth’s resources we have taken them

or granted. But now, over most o the globe… we areace to ace with a serious depletion o ‘resource capital.’More than one country is already bankrupt.” While suchbankruptcy had “wiped out civilizations in the past;there [was] no reason or thinking we can escape the

same ate, unless we change our ways” (p. ix). Decreas-ing returns could be ound everywhere, or widespreadmismanagement had reduced much o the earth’s pro-ductivity to such an extent that “what one man-hour o labor could ormerly produce, now requires ten, y, oreven a hundred man-hours” (idem).

Vogt’s conviction that past belies in progress oradmonitions to be ruitul and multiply could provideno useul guidance or the postwar era is pervasivethroughout his book. Dominant ideas evolved twentycenturies ago, while “magnicent in their days,” had now

become “millstones about [human] necks” and wouldmost certainly turn out to be “idiotic in an overpeopled,atomic age, with much o the world a shambles” (p. ).“We must accept change,” he wrote, and “adjust our livesto it, i we are to survive,” while a ailure to understandsome basic relationships “o man with his environment”

would “almost certainly smash our civilization” (p. xiii).Indeed, not unlike a parasite whose destructiveness

“is limited by the absence o intelligence,” humans usedtheir brains to “tear down”, basically becoming organ-isms willing to enrich their lives, at least temporarily, “bydestroying the environment indispensable to [their] sur-

vival” (p. ). For example,

“Te end o the Babylonian Empire is usually written in terms o wars with the Persians. Littleor no weight is given to the act that Ur, the greatcity o Abraham and once a thriving seaport, nowlies miles within a sterile desert. Te goat andthe ax, driving the sands down to the coast, werear more destructive weapons than the horses and

javelins o the conqueror Cyrus. Hannibal had anempire worth ghting or, and the means o sup-

porting a powerul army. oday the very habitat o the elephants that were his tanks and hal-trackshas been overwhelmed by desert sand, and even theelephants are no more. Cato, in his bitterest brood-ing, could not have oreseen such utter destruc-tion. Te history o Babylon, Assyria, Carthage,China, Spain, Britain – and o the United States– is meaningless unless it is related to the way the

peoples o these countries have treated the plants

on which they depend. Indeed, most o the historythat has been written on these areas gives a pictureas distorted as a Picasso drawing, because it blindly




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ignores the part that plants and their habitats have played in man’s story.” (Vogt, p. )

A similar ate plagued the native inhabitants o areaslater known as Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala, where

the “populations exceeded the carrying capacity o theland” aer they had abandoned hunting and turnedtowards agriculture (Vogt, p. ). None, however, haddone more damage than the Europeans, “one o the mostdestructive groups o human beings that have ever rapedthe earth” (p. ). Troughout the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, they had destroyed the environment“with the seemingly calculated inexorability o a Panzerdivision” (p. ). Teir destructive behaviour had globalrepercussions. For example: “never beore [had] thehydrologic cycle been badly dislocated in the presence

o so many hundreds o millions people” (pp. –). It was indeed possible that, in the course o modern Ameri-can history, more “billions o dollars [had] been spent inan eort to compensate or the abuse o resources thanhave gone into all our battle budgets, including those o

World War II” (p. ).I humans were wreaking havoc everywhere, only

rarely had they ever learned to stabilize or rebuild. ypi-cally, ecological collapse inexorably ollowed so-called“civilizational progress.” With rare exceptions, man had“taken the bounty o the earth and made little or noreturn” (p. ). Where he had not lost water and soil,he had “overgrazed and overcropped, and by the removalo animals and plants, [had] carried away important soilminerals, broken down the all-important soil structure,and generally exhausted the environment” (idem).

In short, mankind had or all intents and purposes“backed itsel into an ecological trap” while, gurativelyspeaking, living on promissory notes (p. ). All overthe world, however, the “notes [were] alling due” and

payment could not “be postponed much longer.” For-

tunately, there was still an option between “paymentand utterly disastrous bankruptcy on a world scale.” In

Vogt’s opinion, it was certainly “more intelligent to pullin our belts and accept a longer period o austerity andrebuilding than to wait or a catastrophic crash o ourcivilization” (p. ), earnestly believing that “a all inliving standards [was] unavoidable” (p. ). Indeed, thehuman race was “caught in a situation as concrete as a

pair o shoes two sizes too small” and there was no needto blame “economic systems, the weather, back luck, orcallous saints” (p. ). Unless the human race rapidly

readjusted its way o living to “the imperatives imposedby the limited resources o [its] environment” it mightas well give up all hope o continuing to enjoy a civilized

existence. “Like Gadarene swine, we shall rush down a war-torn slope to a barbarian existence in the blackenedrubble” (idem).

Tis state o aairs, o course, called not only orclear-head analysis, but also or immediate and drastic

actions. We now turn to a brie summary o Osborn and Vogt’s diagnosis and remedies.

4. Causes o environmental crisis in Osborn’sand Vogt’s work

Osborn and Vogt’s central argument was obviously along the lines o ‘insufcient resources and too many people,’but in their minds a catastrophic situation had beenmade even worse by technological developments and

greed. As Osborn (p. ) put it, “the tide o the earth’s population is rising, the reservoir o the earth’s living resources is alling.” In Vogt’s (p. ) terms, “the earth isnot made o rubber; it cannot be stretched; the humanrace, every nation, is limited in the number o acres it

possesses. And as the number o human beings increases,the relative amount o productive earth decreases, by thatamount.”

Resource scarcity

Like several writers beore and aer them, Osborn and Vogt viewed the physical niteness o the Earth andits ecosystems as imposing some absolute limits on thescale and scope o human development. Unortunately,in Osborn’s (p. ) opinion, “most people still have thenotion that the living resources o the earth are illimit-able and that they can be drawn upon as i there werean endless reserve.” And yet, i population pressures andtheir attendant appetites or resources had “long been

recognized as one o the major causes o war,” there was“scarcely any recognition o the sel-evident act that such

pressures are the major cause o the world-wide deple-tion o the natural living resources o the earth” (idem).Indeed, there could be little doubt that in light o trendsthen observable, such disturbances “will unquestionablyincrease in violence, even to the point o social disinte-gration” (Osborn, p. ).

Perhaps most damaging was humanity’s historicallack o understanding o rainall and water management.Tis had not only “wasted millions o acres o land,

caused sharp drops in crop yields, raised the crests o oods, starved cattle, spread deserts over the ace o theearth, and launched ancient wars,” but also led to such




mistaken belies as the notion that the “European andAmerican economic system is applicable to the rest o the world,” a delusion that was at best, the “hidden seedo uture wars” (such as when “the petroleum amineovertakes us, or as the necessity o importing gasoline or

rening it rom coal or shale boosts its price” (Vogt, p.)) and at worst, would result in “the collapse o ourcivilization” (Vogt, p. ).

O course, the main reason why the Europeans – andto a lesser extent the Japanese, who possessed the “incon-siderable psychological advantage o being accustomedto a lower standard o living” ( Vogt, p. ) – had in time“enrolled under the banner o Dr. Pangloss” (Vogt, p.) rather than the theories o the “clear-sighted Englishclergyman” Dr. Malthus (p. ) is that they had beenawash in “the bounty rom the New World cornucopia”

(p. ) and had increasingly come to depend on importsrom distant lands ranging rom Arica to Australia andLatin America. Unbeknown to most o them, however,

was that sugar production “was wearing out the soil inthe West Indies and coee… ripping down hillsides romGuatemala to Brazil” (p. ), while other imports cameat the cost o “gullies in Georgia, dongas in South Arica,barrancas in El Salvador, oods in Missouri, [and] duststorms in the asman Sea” (Vogt, p. ).

Overpopulation

Osborn and Vogt saw population growth as the maincause o environmental destruction. Once, Osborn (p.) believed, “man’s numbers were limited, and up tohistoric times he had plenty o land to support him ade-quately without allowing that land to become depleted,”or, in Vogt’s (p. ) opinion, at least or “extremely long

periods o time.” Tis balance was lost as the develop-ment o agriculture and the “inclination o people to

concentrate” in some geographical areas became clear(Osborn, p. ). Te “violent explosive upsurge in humannumbers” (Osborn, p. ) that coincided with the end o

widespread and recurring amines in some parts o the world throughout the early decades o the nineteenthcentury, however, was the most worrisome developmento all.

According to Vogt (p. ), the “history o the uture”– or at least the coming decades – had already been

written. Tis basic idea could be conveyed using a simplegraph with one curve being the human population that,

“aer centuries o relative equilibrium, suddenly beganto mount, and in the past y years had been climbing at a vertiginous rate.” Te other curve would symbolize

natural resources such as the “area and thickness o ourtopsoil, the abundance o our orests, available waters,lie-giving grasslands, and the biophysical web that holdthem together.” With the exception o “local depres-sions,” this curve had also maintained a “high degree o

regularity through the centuries,” but it too had begunto sharply diverge, “especially during the past hundredand y years,” aer which it “plung[ed] downward likea rapid.” Te act that these two curves “have long sincecrossed” and were ever more rapidly “drawing apart,” wasbecoming increasingly more obvious with each passing day (idem).

In places like Mexico, “the pressure o an increas-ing population, combined with the mounting injury toexisting cultivable areas by erosion, is orcing people touse land that is totally unadapted to the growing o crops

and at the same time is compelling the country to rely onimports or much o its basic ood supply” (Osborn, p.). While its situation might not have seemed as direto the casual observer, “unortunately… in spite o the

war, the German massacres, and localized malnutrition,the population o Europe, excluding Russia, increasedby ,, people between and ” (Vogt,

p. ). Even a resource rich country like the UnitedStates was already “overpopulated rom the standpointo per capita economic welare” and could conceivablybenet rom reducing its population by a third – rom million individuals to million (Vogt, p. ).Indeed, Osborn (p. ) eared an increase in conictsand bloodshed at the prospect that the world’s popula-tion would reach the three billion mark by the middle o the twenty-rst century. Be that as it may, the “mount-ing destruction… inict[ed] upon our lie sources” andthe “vast surges and pressures o increasing populations”

were “conditions that need to be thought o together,not separately” (Osborn, pp. –).

Not surprisingly, both Osborn and Vogt’s writings on

population and resource availability reected the think-ing o wildlie managers. For example, Vogt (p. )chastised the authors o a report written or the UN Foodand Agricultural Organization on the prospects o post-

WWII Greece because it didn’t contain any “suggestionthat a positive eort be made to reduce the breeding o the Greeks. How a group o scientists would justiy suchan omission on any rational grounds it would be inter-esting to know; such neglect would disqualiy a wild-lie manager in our most backward states!” Te logicalconclusion that could be derived rom this premise was

that rich countries like the United States “should [not]subsidize the unchecked spawning” o the inhabitantso poor countries like India and China until they had




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adopted a “rational population policy” (Vogt, p. ).Indeed, a high death rate could even be considered “oneo the greatest national asset” o poor economies (Vogt,

p. ), while pests like tsetse ies and malaria carrying mosquitoes could be thought o as “blessings in dis-

guise” as well as the “protector o important resources”(Vogt, pp. –). Failure to keep populations in check would deliver results similar to those observed earlier inthe British Raj:

“Beore the imposition o Pax Britannica, Indiahad an estimated population o less than million people. It was in check by disease, amine,and ghting. Within a remarkably short periodthe British checked the ghting and contrib-uted considerably to making amines ineectual,

by building irrigation works, providing meanso ood storage, and importing ood during

periods o starvation. Some industrialization andimproved medicine and sanitation did the rest.

While economic and sanitary conditions werebeing “improved,” the Indians went to their accus-tomed way, breeding with the irresponsibility o codsh; as Chandrasekhar points out, sex play isthe national sport. By the population hadincreased per cent; by , according to StateDepartment estimates, the population o India willbe over ,,. Te dilemma is neatly statedby Dr. Chandrasekhar, who says: “India’s popula-tion today exceeds millions and at the lowestminimum o , calories she can only eed lessthan million people!… more than a hundredmillion people… are either starving or on the brinko starvation.” (Vogt, pp. –)

Fortunately, “British withdrawal rom India may wellresult in the reversal o the population trend that this

country so badly needs i her people are ever to achievea reasonably decent standard o living” (Vogt, p. ).Similar results could be observed in Arican colonies

where Europeans had “temporarily removed the Mal-thusian checks” when they had “put down tribal wars,destroyed predators [and] moved enough ood aboutthe continent to check amine” without substituting “constructive measures to balance [their] destruction o the old order” (Vogt, p. ). Te introduction o newcultivars was similarly destructive in the long run. Forexample, Vogt (p. ) believed that corn had probably

caused more misery than syphilis, another potent con-tribution o the New World.

Measures to alleviate human suering, such as the

“ank attack on the tsetse y with DD or some otherinsecticide” carried out by “ecologically ignorant sani-tarians, entomologists, and medical men” (Vogt, p.), was thereore worse than doing nothing. In chill-ing paragraphs reminiscent o what would later come

to be known as “lieboat ethics” and the “economicso spaceship earth,” Vogt (p. ) didn’t see “any kind-ness in keeping people rom dying o malaria so thatthey could die more slowly o starvation.” Indeed, themodern medical proession was setting the stage ora disaster o epic proportions by continuing to believethat it had “a duty to keep alive as many people as pos-sible” and, “through medical care and improve sanita-tion,” being responsible “or more millions living more

years in increasing misery” (p. ). Actually, publicsanitation and agricultural improvement campaigns in

places like El Salvador, India and Puerto Rico, amountedto nothing short o “brutally misguided well-doing” (p.). One should instead take inspiration rom AncientGreece where the constant threat o overpopulation was“purposeully reduced” through “prostitution, inanti-cide, emigration and colonization” (p. ) and concludethat i the conict between communists and nationalists

would in all likelihood result in the “horror o extensiveamines in China within the next ew years” it might wellbe, rom a broader perspective, “not only desirable butindispensable” (Vogt, p. ).

5. Economic development in Osborn’s and Vogt’s work

Osborn and Vogt’s writings reected the dislike o the prot motive and technological change that was charac-teristic o proto-environmentalist writings. Not surpris-ingly, they similarly called or more and better publicmanagement rather than greater reliance on market

incentives. Interestingly, however, they also discussedconcepts later known as the ‘ragedy o the Commons’and ‘perverse subsidies.’

Technological change

Both Osborn and Vogt shared a proound scepticism – i not overt dislike – o the alleged benets o most sci-entic advances and technological innovations, at leastinasmuch as they could be conceived by some as helping

to reconcile economic development, population growthand environmental remediation. Apart rom the act thatthe development o sanitary technologies increased the





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subject. Man assumes that what has been good or indus-try must necessarily be good or the land. Tis may proveto be one o the most expensive mistakes in history.”

Osborn and Vogt’s dislike o ree markets stemmed in part rom their abhorrence o popular consumerism and

its attendant “gadgetry,” such as “pulp-paper ordure o ‘love’ stories, crime tales, and ‘comics’ valuable enough to justiy extirpation o the world’s orests” and “unessentialelectrical knickknacks, industries, and the hydroelectric

power necessary to operate them,” the result o whichbeing that the United States exhibited “one o the highestinsanity rates in the world” (Vogt, p. ). O course, these

vulgar pleasures resulted in part rom the impossibilityo assigning “a cash value to the heart’s li at the asho a scarlet tanager, the outpoured song o the solitaire,the towering o white ibises over the Everglades, or even

the homely chattering o the dooryard wren” (Vogt, pp.–). Unortunately, when touched by colonization,the native population exhibited much the same tendencyto show o its newound wealth, which oen took theorm o new cattle acquisitions that ultimately resultedin the “destruction o [its] capital, in terms o pasturage,ertility, and available water resources” (Vogt, p. ).

Also signicant in shaping their intellectual outlook was their observation o the environmentally destructive practices o the American “stockmen and sheepherd-ers… [who] deteriorate and destroy the grasses, expediteerosion, and contribute to ood peaks… [and] exist bydestroying the means o national survival,” the “cut-out-and-get-out lumberman,” the “wheatgrower who reck-lessly sets the trigger or a new dust-bowl explosion,”the “hunter or trapper who takes more than his share o

surplus animals,” and “the armer who exhausts his soiland ails to utilize soil-stabilization methods” (Vogt, p.). O course, “renewable resources” were only renew-able inasmuch as they were “managed on a sustainable-

yield basis, with the crop restricted to replacement

capacity,” but unortunately, Americans had been living on their “resource capital” since (Vogt, p. ).

Tis lack o oresight could also be observed indevelopments motivated by the “desire or nationalenrichment” and “the wish to gain prot rom the soil”in peripheral economies (Osborn, p. ). For example,in Egypt, year-round irrigation had been substituted orthe traditional basin or ood time irrigation “to supportthe prot motive, namely the growing o cash crops suchas cotton and tobacco or export.” As a result, Egyptiansoil was “steadily deteriorating” and the “cotton yields

are alling!” Similar practices could also be observed inovergrazed grasslands “where herdsmen try to main-tain the largest possible number o animals on a limited

range, grazing at all times, seasonable and unseasonable,and so destroy the grass and bushes to such an extent thatnothing is le but nearly barren ground” (Osborn, pp.–). In Osborn’s (pp. –) opinion, the situation

which “better exemplies the dire consequences o over-

using the land or purposes o trade and prots” was theAustralian sheep industry where a consistent eort hadbeen made “to gain rom the land more than it is capableo producing.” Unortunately, the day “when new reshlands can be ound is now almost over” (Osborn, p. ).

Apart rom ‘exporting’ the environmental problemso advanced economies, “get rich quick” schemes hadalso ostered among contemporary Americans a “wast-er’s psychology” that would have “appalled [their] rugalorebears” and was regarded as “lunacy – even criminallunacy – by people in other parts o the world” (Vogt, p.

). Among other symptoms o this waster’s minder werethe “millions o dripping aucets… losing precious water”and the “millions o unneeded electric lights burn[ing],every year, untold thousands o tons o American coal”(Vogt, p. ).

Osborn and Vogt’s take on the environmental impacto the prot motive typically equates ree-markets with

prots at any costs and by any means, including gov-ernment subsidies and government-granted privileges,along with environmentally destructive public initiativesthat trampled private parties’ property rights – in other

words, private prots through public losses. Notableexamples o this perspective include Vogt’s (p. ) con-demnation o businesses that had poisoned “thousandso streams and rivers with industrial wastes” costing “hundreds o cities… millions o dollars so that they maysaely drink the waste dumped into the rivers upstream”(p.), and o typical private arming responses to uc-tuating prices: “ood prices rise and so does the worlddemand or ood; the armer overstocks his pastures,

plants every available inch o marginal land to cash in

‘while the going’s good.’ Prices all and he loudly criesthat he cannot aord to improve his land; he must havea subsidy” (pp. –).

Both authors also alluded to the impact o landtenure on its management. For example, Osborn (p.) observed that historically much European land“was not as a rule held in great tracts by any one person,but was divided up and held in relatively small tracts orthe use and benets o individual owners and their am-ilies. Tus, it was protected and cared or.” Furthermore,“stone walls as well as thick hedges surrounding most

elds have also contributed to the continuance o soilertility, or there can be little erosion in closely walledelds” (Osborn, p. ). O course, other property-rights




0

based social customs could be damaging to the land,such as a tradition o dividing up the land among chil-dren rather than leaving it to one child (Osborn, p. ).

Vogt (p. ) similarly recognized that “becausesharecroppers and other arm tenants do not have a

long-range stake in the land, their tendency – a reec-tion o our industrial philosophy – is to make as largea prot as possible and to spend on the land as little as

possible.” Although he seems to have been supportiveo policies that would turn tenants into landowners(p. ), he was nonetheless more circumspect or, i “in many regions a shi rom tenancy to ownership

would certainly save large acreages that are becoming marginal, i not desert,” in “other areas, such a changemight well tend to have the opposite eect” (p. ). Acase in point was Zapatista’s Mexico where land reorm

had turned the land over rom a ew thousand landhold-ers to several hundred times more, but less educatedindividuals, who were reluctant to change their arming methods. In Vogt’s (p. ) opinion, “it never occurredto Zapata that ownership o anything as indispensableas land imposes unavoidable responsibility, along with‘right.’” Indeed, Vogt probably never doubted that pro-essional public land managers reed rom political pres-sures would achieve better results than less-educated

private owners, such as could be observed in the nation-alization and subsequent management o the Peruvianguano islands (pp. –). Interestingly, this seemsto have also been Osborn’s (p. ) perspective whenhe observed in the Russian context that “cultivating theland in small strips under earlier peasant ownership lethe agricultural areas more deenceless against droughtthan the present-day collective arms” which benetedrom “more intelligent methods such as the more exten-sive planting o winter crops, earlier spring planting andthe cultivation o types o crops that are most capable o resisting drought conditions.”

As can be expected, various ‘tragedy o the commons’scenarios – or more accurately tragedies o open accessor mismanaged commons – were also discussed by bothauthors. For example, Vogt (p. ) wrote that “industryhas been allowed to treat our underground water sup-

plies as though they were inexhaustible, and the prosperity and possibly the existence o many o our citieshave been jeopardized through waste o waters,” while“commercial shermen, assuming the pirate’s prerogativeto take whatever he can get, have reduced the popula-tions o several important shes to a point where it is

no longer economically possible to take them.” Indeed,because numerous American landowners had been

plunged into bankruptcy by reckless environmental

mismanagement such as “the removal o orest cover onan upper watershed [that] will inevitably damage the

water supply in the valley below,” Osborn (pp. –)thought it obvious that there was “nothing revolutionaryin the concept that renewable resources are the property

o all the people and, thereore, that land use must beco-ordinated into an over-all plan.” Indeed, this prin-ciple has been recognized in other democracies, such asin Western Europe, and in the United States through theennessee Valley Authority. Actually, there were nowreal grounds or hope in the United States as within “thelast decade more has been accomplished than in all pre-

vious years o our history. Federal and state agencies aresteadily doing more eective work and unlimited creditshould be given to the able and intelligent men who areaccomplishing everything within their power to save

America or its uture children” (Osborn, p. ). Butthen Osborn (p. ) asked rhetorically “Why shouldgovernment do it?” in the land o ree enterprises?Unortunately, as it turns out, relying upon individualinitiative could “only be counted upon when there isgeneral public understanding o a situation and o themeans o dealing with it,” but this knowledge was lacking among the increasingly urbanized American population.

Interestingly, both authors were well aware o thereality o political management and the widespreadimpact o what would now be reerred to as ‘rentseeking’ and its attendant ‘perverse subsidies.’ A well-documented historical case to this eect was the medi-eval Spanish migratory sheepherders’ institution knownas the ‘Mesta’ whose members had been granted several

privileges at the expense o the settled population bySpanish rulers hungry or wool-derived revenues. Tese

privileges included “cutting small trees and branches tosupply their needs in uel and odder as they went along”

which seems “to have been the beginning o misuse o the untenanted lands through which they passed.” Other

privileges included the act that “common lands in somecases were thrown open to the sheepmen, taxes or theiruse or their non-use were levied, and the money col-lected reverted to the crown or to political agents o therulers.” As a result, “everywhere land was overgrazed,orests were burned o to provide extra pasturage, young trees were cut down or odder or rewood, and the des-

perate cycle o greed and overuse and erosion was setinto motion.” Although the Mesta was eventually over-thrown, it was not beore “it had in all too real a senseoverthrown the balance o man and nature in Spain”

(Osborn, pp. –).

Far rom being an exception, the Mesta was a harbin-ger o things to come, inasmuch as the “people o other



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countries are engaged in just this sort o wastage o their prime resources today. Tey – and this includes us o the United States – are too near to the picture to realize

what is happening” (Osborn, p. ). A case in point wasovergrazing in American public lands that had become

so worrisome that the aylor Grazing Act had to be passed in to rein in abuses. Unortunately, “power-ul minority groups o cattlemen now dominate[d] itsadministration, their representatives comprising the

personnel o the advisory boards that were established ineach o the cattle-industry states.” Not surprisingly, theadvisory boards had over the years “acquired sufcient

power to greatly inuence the regulations, as to both thenumber o cattle that can graze in a region and the eesor grazing rights to be paid by cattle owners,” which ascan be expected, did not impact entrenched interests

o those inuencing the legal ramework (Osborn, pp.–). O course, a ‘oor’ under wool prices and‘protective’ taris only made things worse by preventing “many woolgrowers [rom being ] orced out o business”(Vogt, p. ). But while “reducing herds and importing meat and wool rom other countries might [have given]the grass a chance to restore itsel,” powerul cattle andsheep interests had successully nullied “such obviouslysound attempts to relieve the strain on American ranges”(Vogt, p. ).

As could be expected, lumber interests were similarly“striving to eect arrangements so that the prots o theircorporations may be assured and, i possible, increased”(Osborn, p. ). Indeed, in Vogt’s (p. ) perspective,stock raising, hunting and shing, lumbering and evenmuch o arming had not only “emptied the bank vaults,”but were now trying to remain relevant by “peddling thedesks, chairs, and cuspidors” which, “in our nationalinterest” should be “liquidated, at least in part. In the

process, a good many people are certain to be hurt, as inany liquidation. But the longer it is postponed the more

people will suer.”Te absurdity o subsidizing environmental destruc-

tion and then asking taxpayers to oot the bill or reme-diation was certainly not lost on either Osborn or Vogt.In the words o the latter, “western senators advocateenormously expensive Valley authorities, [but] continueto oster overgrazing and erosion o valley watershedsby voting or sheepmen’s subsidies!” at a time when theAmerican school system threatened “to break downbecause we cannot pay teachers a decent wage, or supporthospitals to care or the sick, we are urged to spend bil-

lions on people too stupid to stay o ood plains, and ondamming rivers that have got out o hand largely becauseo destruction o orests and grasslands” (Vogt, p. ). In

the long run, it was difcult “to see any justication or[the] support o extractive overcropping” (Vogt, p. ).

6. Solutions in Osborn’s and Vogt’s work

In light o their diagnosis and ormative inuences,Osborn and Vogt’s remedies were airly straightorwardi not always spelled out in much detail. Vogt (p. )thus wrote that i “economic, political, educational, andother measures” were indispensable, they would onlysucceed i “population control and conservation [were]included.” Indeed, economic and political prescriptionsthat ignored “the ecological” dimension may orce “thehuman race deeper into the mire” (idem). In turn, eco-logical health was dependent on two actors:

Tat renewable resources be used to produceas much wealth as possible on a sustained-yieldbasis. In other words, wise use to support as high aliving standard as possible was desirable, but theyshouldn’t be exhausted as there could be no articialsubstitutes.

Tat demand be adjusted to ‘natural’ supply,either by accepting less per capita (lowering living standards) or reducing population. Sincecivilization at the end o World War II could notsurvive a drastic lowering o standards, the need or

population cuts was unavoidable (Vogt, p. )

While Osborn shared this prescription (pp. –) and similarly believed that any real solution would“involve complete co-operation on the part o bothgovernment and industry, backed by the public’s insist-ence that the job shall be done” (p. ), he was evenmore emphatic on the need to “arouse public opinion”in terms o the seriousness o America’s (and the world’s)

environmental crisis.Such an undertaking would require “the co-ordinated

eort o every group, governmental and private, that isdedicated to the cause o conservation” and would needto be “established throughout our educational system sothat coming generations will grow up aware o the situa-tion that lies at the root o the well-being o our nation”(idem). Tanks in part to Osborn, Vogt and their ol-lowers’ actions, numerous organizations, rom grass-root initiatives to the United Nations, would becomeinvolved in this outreach eort in ollowing years and

decades.Although they stumbled upon some o the key

insights o the perspective later known as “ree-market




2

environmentalism,” neither Osborn nor Vogt seemedto have considered the potential environmental bene-ts o reduced governmental interventions. A case cannonetheless be made that most o the “ree-market prac-tices” they denounced, such as nancial and land sub-

sidies to railroad, timber, grazing and other interests,as well as overshing and overgrazing, can ultimatelybe attributed to ailures to develop adequate marketinstitutions such as private property rights or to let the

price mechanism determine resource allocation without political intererences – what Bradley () reers toas “political capitalism.” For example, Vogt ailed toask why polluting industries could not be sued or thedamage they inicted upon others – as was tradition-ally the custom in market economies until these rightshad been taken away or drastically curbed by politicians

seeking to “balance” economic growth and environ-mental protection – or why agricultural producers hadbecome so dependent on subsidies or were oen taking a short-term perspective on the impact o their activities.

While he was well aware that the “subsidized industrial-ist” and the armer beneting rom subsidy payments

were very keen “to protest any real attempt at ree enterprise” (p. ), he was nonetheless always more inclinedto avor greater (but obviously better) as opposed tolesser political management.

7. Reactions to Osborn’s and Vogt’s work

Many reviewers, such as Angus McDonald () inTe New Republic , oen jointly praised the authors ortheir eorts and overall concerns, but some assessments

were mixed and a ew were extremely critical. As McCor-mick (, p. ) observes, the two books “receivedapproval rom ecologists and adverse criticisms rom soilscientists.” o give a ew examples o the (overall more

numerous) positive reception o these works, A. G. Hall(, p. ) in Te Scientic Monthly proclaimed thatOsborn had “perormed a task equal in importance tothat o the prophets o old,” while in his textbook Eco-nomics, John Ise (, p. ) wrote that “both o thesesignicant books are brilliantly written and should beread by all who are concerned about man’s uture.” JohnMyres (, p. ) in Man observed that Our Plundered

Planet was “dedicated to all who care about tomorrow”and that the book was helpul in instilling responsibilityin the public to live in harmony with nature, rather than

continue to indulge in the activities that were imperil-ing the earth. Indeed, most reviews o Road to Surial reached a conclusion similar to the Blackiars Journal’s

writer who claimed that Osborn provided his readers with a “valuable insight into the inter-relatedness o those secondary causes as revealed by the ndings o thesciences o biology, ecology and agronomy” (Singleton,, p. ). Te act that Osborn was somewhat more

optimistic than Vogt was reected in generally moresympathetic assessments, even by writers who disagreed with his analysis (Chase, ; Zirkle, ).

Tere were nonetheless a ew critical reviews. Forexample, Conway Zirkle (, p. ) took Osborn totask in Isis or several actual errors and misunderstand-ings that could have been avoided with clearer wording and urther claimed his statements oen strayed romthe truth or were overly general in nature without cred-ible acts to support them. Other reviewers highlightedsimilar points or aulted Osborn and Vogt or their con-

clusions and lack o concrete solutions. Interestingly,even William Vogt (b, p. ) criticized his riendOsborn on this point, claiming that while he repeatedlyaddressed the problems associated with overpopula-tion, he did not provide a viable solution to keep it romhappening. More specically, Brandt (, p. ) con-sidered Vogt’s stance on agricultural practices and soilconservation no longer completely accurate by inlight o recent advances. aeuber (, p. ) wrotethat soil scientists would most likely nd ault with

Vogt’s interpretation o basic acts, particularly regard-ing land use, soil wastage, and the availability o largescale resources or agricultural production in Arica andSouth America. F. Fraser Darling (, p. ) claimedthat while the rationale behind population reduction

was obvious to most people, or political reasons nocountry would want to see their population decline, norsuer the repercussions i it did.

As Cooke () urther observed, placing ecologyahead o other disciplines such as engineering, orestryand agricultural science, precluded the development o

multiaceted solutions that alone would prove eectiveand, in the end, amounted to a utopian dream in lighto the act that ecology would never come to dominate

public opinion. Fisher () highlighted Vogt andOsborn’s inability to relate conservation economics toeconomic theory as a major downall, particularly interms o attracting eective public support. aylor (,

p. ) was visibly uncomortable with Vogt’s stance onhow little value he assigned to human lives, especially inless advanced parts o the world, but nonetheless con-sidered laudable his suggestion that the United States

should make aid contingent upon an active birth control policy. A French reviewer who was visibly upset by Vogt’scharacterization o the Soviet Union as a ‘police state’




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wrote that the author’s methods, basic mistakes andimplicit conclusions were not unlike those o the worsegeopolitical writings o pre World War II Germany(George , p. ).

Tree contemporary critical discussions o Osborn’s

and Vogt’s books nonetheless stood out.

Te rst sig-nicant condemnation o Osborn’s and (mostly) Vogt’sstance was penned by a ime anonymous () reviewer

who questioned the political implications o their neo-Malthusian stance and views on soil and populationgrowth. As he put it, i even rich nations had too ewresources to keep their populations passably well ed,then what should be done i not go out, conquer andclear other lands o their populations? Aer all, hadn’tGermany, a country that had managed to “stretch” thesandy acres o the Prussian plain through innovative

arming practices and highly skilled industry, alreadygone to war twice because o the unwarranted prevalenceo the “slice-o-cake [that can’t be grown] philosophy”among its people?

According to the reviewer, Vogt’s assertions on soilhad by then been totally discredited by “real agricul-tural scientists” who considered “every main article o the Neo-Malthusian creed” as “either alse or distortedor unprovable.” Arguing that an acre o soil is limitedin terms o its production capacity or biotic potentialignored the act that humans were capable o improving it. Indeed, only individuals who had turned their backon progress could accept the notion that they wouldhave to adapt to soil patterns or survival. Te revieweralso reuted the idea that the productive capability o the

world’s cultivated lands would continue to all due toerosion and exhaustion. While Vogt was correct to pointout that humans did not maintain soils as diligently as

perhaps they could have, he had ignored tremendousrecent progress in terms o improving soil quality, in the

process delivering increased production capabilities, par-

ticularly in the United States.Te same writer criticized Vogt’s basic outlook on

human reproduction, especially his stance that, as long as ood is available, humans would reproduce like ‘ruities.’ Te basic problem with this argument was that ithad long been know that richer people typically tendto have ewer children despite their access to a moreabundant ood supply, while the exact opposite was trueo poorer classes. I Vogt’s argumentation was valid,industrialization should have triggered a rapidly increas-ing birth rate, but this could only be observed in the

early stages o the process, whereas a steady decrease inbirth rates was observed aerward. Furthermore, RomanCatholic Ireland had by achieved population

stability and could boast o having one o the lowestbirthrates in the world.

In the end, “real scientists” could only nd a ew iotao truth in Osborn’s and Vogt’s “errors, prejudices, mys-ticism and reckless appeals to emotion.” Teir “static”

philosophy, however, gave “great comort” to the typeo state planner who believed that there were only somany resources available and that whatever was availableneeded to be strictly controlled. Te attending result, o course, was that “any group ruled by this static idea willturn its back on progress and become socially reaction-ary” (idem).

Interestingly, ime published soon aerwards a shortrebuttal to this essay written by Karl Sax (), thendirector o the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard Univer-sity, who argued that while Vogt had “exaggerated the

dangers o soil erosion,” he had “underestimated the dif-culties in the adequate control o population growth andthe control o ‘moral erosion.’” R. J. McGinnis (),then editor o the Farm Quarterly, similarly argued inanother letter to the editors that while most ‘soil men’had never taken the Malthusian ramework “too lit-erally,” it had nonetheless proven useul in “righten[ing]armers into soil conservation.” Te ime editors none-theless stood by the original review essay, pointing outthat the scientists consulted in the preparation o thearticle (in the US Bureau o Plant Industry, Soils andAgricultural Engineering and in the US Soil Conserva-tion Service) strongly disagreed with Vogt’s assessment.

Another interesting ollow-up to this controversytook place in November , when the editors o Te

Nation contacted Vogt and oered him the opportunityto publish in their magazine a reply to the ime’s review.However, since they had not taken an editorial positionon the issue, they intended to solicit comments on Vogt’sreply in an eort to represent both sides o the debate.Te person who soon ollowed up on their request

was the University o Delaware geographer Earl ParkerHanson, whose critique o Vogt’s response was report-edly vitriolic. Vogt ollowed up by submitting anotherlengthy reply, this time to Hanson’s piece, which he laterreused to shorten at the behest o Te Nation’ s editors,resulting in the cancellation o the project. Had thiscollaboration not allen through, it may well have beenone o the rst times that both sides o the issue wouldhave been debated in a public orum, thereby making them accessible to the layman.

Hanson, however, did not let matters rests and soon

aerwards published a book titled New Worlds Emerging which he described as a rebuttal to Osborn, Vogt andother “Jeremiahs o geography, sociology and economics”




(Hanson , p. ). Te geographer argued, among other things, that “it is never a land that is over-popu-lated, in terms o inhabitants per square mile; it is alwaysan economy, in terms o inhabitants per square meal”(p. ). Adopting as his motto Robert Torne’s

observation that “there is no land unhabitable, nor seaunnavigable,” Hanson emphasized that much was landstill available or development in the Amazon basin andin the lower Arctic (such as in Alaska). Denouncing the“hysteria” into which the modern world was “being stam-

peded… by the dreadul word erosion” (p. ) and theresurgence o the “old, mechanistic Malthusian doctrine”(p. ), he had no patience or the notions that naturalresources should be conserved “not sanely by way o making the most o them, but hysterically, as an isolated

party o explorers might hoard and ration its dwindling

ood supplies” (p. ); that people should be consideredas “liabilities” rather than “assets and potential resources”(p. ); or that a region would be considered “over-popu-lated” in terms o a population/space ratio alone withoutactoring in the potential benets o economic develop-ment (p. ) that would in time produce “more in orderto have more to go around” (p. ). Indeed, throughouthistory, humanity had met population increases “not inany one way, but by a complex, interrelated application o three distinct lines o eort, namely migration, change o social and economic organization, and technical inven-tion” (p. ). Hanson was especially critical o Vogt’s“astonishing… tendency to resent all past progress” andlament that “Adam and Eve [had to leave] the Gardeno Eden” (p. ) without understanding that “conserva-tion on large scale… can only be supported by energeticeconomic development” (p. ). As he put it:

“o proclaim a numerical limit on the world’sarable lands, while decrying the technical advances

with which that limit can be stretched by many

millions o acres, is to turn one’s back on reality.Even birth control on a large scale can be accom-

plished only by raising standards o living throughindustrialization. Not only do people need moneyor buying contraceptives, but they need manychildren or cheap labor so long as they live in

poverty and degradation. Tey will be more likelyto think about having ewer children when theyare in a position to worry about sending them tocollege.” (Hanson , p. )

In a later paper, Hanson () would describe the“currently popular Vogt school o demographers andconservationists” as postulating the twin bogeymen o

overpopulation and soil erosion as the prices we must pay or conscious eorts to improve human existence”(p. ) and describe Vogt as the “modern spiritualdescendant” o earlier geographical determinists such asEllsworth Huntington (p. ). Interestingly, a compari-

son o Hanson and Vogt’s books was sometimes an essaytopic or geography students in the s (Galloway,, p. ).

Finally, the Brazilian physician and geographer Josuéde Castro’s classic () Te Geography o Hunger alsobecame to a large extent a rebuttal to William Vogt, the“standard-bearer o the neo-Malthusians” who were keento view “amished populations, raising the pressure o the world by their delirium o reproduction [as] crimin-als” who deserved “an exemplary punishment” and were“condemned to extermination, either by individual star-

vation or by controlling reproduction until the born-to-starve disappear rom the ace o the earth” (pp. –).Raising issues similar to their other critics, de Castroadopted Hanson’s perspective and urther illustrated itby the purchase “or nearly nothing” o degraded coeegrowing land in around São Paulo by Japanese immi-grants who, being experienced in working “thanklesssoils,” had developed rom it a “magnicent green belt”

which was then contributing much to the ood supply(especially in terms o potatoes and vegetables) o theBrazilian industrial heartland (p. ). De Castro endedhis book by highlighting that the “real road to survival[was] still within the sight o man [and was] marked bythe condence he must eel in his own strength.” As he

put it:

“Te road to survival, thereore, does not lie in theneo-Malthusian prescriptions to eliminate surplus

people, nor in birth control, but in the eort tomake everybody on the ace o the earth produc-tive. Hunger and misery are not caused by the pres-

ence o too many people in the world, but rather byhaving ew to produce and many to eed. Te neo-Malthusian doctrine o a dehumanized economy,

which preaches that the weak and the sick shouldbe le to die, which would help the starving to diemore quickly, and which even goes to the extremeo suggesting that medical and sanitary resourcesshould not be made available to the more miser-able populations – such policies merely reect themean and egotistical sentiments o people living

well, terried by the disquieting presence o those

who are living badly.

Te world, ortunately, will not let itsel be carried




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away by such deeatist and disintegrative conceptions. Inspite o their scientic aura, these ideas cannot show usa road to survival. Tey can only point the way to death,to revolution and to war – the road to perdition.” (deCastro , p. )

Refective conclusion

Reviewing the evolution o the dierent versions o Malthus’ Essay, Petersen (, pp. –) observesthat the rst edition was written “with an aggressivecondence, a dashing style that passed over excep-tions, anomalies, and minor points, and swept on to themain conclusion with youthul condence” and that it“brought the author immediate ame and notoriety.”

In later decades, however, Malthus would painstak-ingly rene, expand, update and revise his manuscript,acknowledge predecessors and mistakes, answer critics,and reach more sober conclusions, such as the ollowing:

“On the whole, thereore, though our uture prospects respecting the mitigation o the evils arising rom the principle o population may not beso bright as we could wish, yet they are ar rombeing entirely disheartening, and by no means pre-clude that gradual and progressive improvement inhuman satiety, which, beore the late wild specu-lations on this subject, was the object o rationalexpectation… And although we cannot expect thatthe virtue and happiness o mankind will keep pace

with the brilliant career o physical discovery; yet,i we are not wanting to ourselves, we may con-dently indulge the hope that, to no unimportantextent, they will be inuenced by its progress and

will partake in its success.” (Malthus , Book IV,Chapter XIV)

Paul Ehrlich’s ‘explosive’ public career, and its atten-dant ame and ortune, similarly took o at a relatively

young age in the wake o a powerul call to action thathas been described by otherwise well-disposed reviewersas “unscholarly and occasionally in error” (Luten ,

p. ). Unlike Malthus’s original essay, however, theEhrlichs’s contribution came on the heels o a debate thathad been raging or over two centuries in the Western

World and at a time when some o the mistaken assump-tions and predictions o Faireld Osborn Jr. and William

Vogt were already apparent. o give but one case, Vogt (p.) quoted a report according to which Mexico did not

possess more than a third o the land required to provide

its inhabitants with a reasonable diet. He urther believedthat “Mexico’s arable land [was] being rapidly washedinto the sea” and that the country was becoming steadily

poorer “under the pressure o a rapidly growing popu-lation.” In the years between the publication o Vogt’s

and the Ehrlichs’s best-sellers, however, signicant scien-tic advances in plant genetics and production methodscompletely overturned the situation. For example,the Mexican work o American agronomist NormanBorlaug and his team on the development o semi-dwar high-yield and disease-resistant wheat varieties resultedin the Mexican wheat crop being six times largerthan in . Soon aerwards, Mexico became a wheatexporting country (Anonymous ). O course, a ew

years later this know-how was transerred to Pakistanand India where they similarly helped to diuse the local

“population bombs” and earned Borlaug the nicknameo “Father o the Green Revolution.”

In light o the Mexican and other cases at the time,it is difcult not to conclude that while the Ehrlichs’soverall concerns were legitimate, their rhetorical styleand exaggerations weren’t. Furthermore, unlike Malthus,they were later in lie unwilling to revise their position inlight o new evidence and always reused to debate ace-to-ace their main critic, the economist Julian Simon. One also gets an overwhelming sense o déjà u in theirmore recent work, such as in, or example, their use o “Te Population Explosion” as a book title (Ehrlich andEhrlich ) or in comments that hark back to the old‘erosion literature,’ such as their observation that “theextraordinary expansion o ood production since Mal-thus’s time has been achieved at a heavy cost – the deple-tion o a one-time inheritance o natural capital crucialto agriculture” that amounted in the mid s to anannual loss o approximately billion tons o topsoiland “millions o populations and species o other organ-isms” (Ehrlich et al . , pp. –; see also Ridley, this

issue). As such, they stuck to the blueprint laid out byOsborn Jr. and Vogt whose ime (, non paginated)critic accused o constantly claiming “that new andrightening threats have developed recently.”

As Rubin (, p. ) observes, the only things thatreally sets apart Te Population Bomb rom other con-temporary writings on the alleged population-resource

problem is its emotional appeal and alarmist tone. Itseems hard to deny that this was indeed the main lessonlearned by the present generation o environmental

writers rom the Ehrlichs’s success…




Notes

1. See, among others, Booth and Mongillo (), DeLeon

(), Greene () and Rubin () or various

discussions o the impact o Te Population Bomb.

Although the name o Paul Ehrlich is the only one

appearing on the cover o the book, his wie Anne is

described as a virtual co-author in the Acknowledgements

section. Because o this and their later collaboration on

numerous projects, reerences to the “Ehrlichs’s” book

will be made throughout this essay.

2. For example, Yale Law School proessor Douglas Kysar

(, p. ) describes Te Population Bomb as “a work

that attempted to revive Malthusian concerns about

population growth”; the economist Jason Scorse (,

p. ) contends that “population growth and its impact

on the environment has been a hot topic or decades,

ever since Paul Ehrlich’s the ‘Population Bomb’ was published in ”; and the sociologist William Catton

(,p. ) quotes the population biologist Arthur

S. Boughey has having credited Te Population Bomb

with having “helped revive attention to warnings about

overpopulation.”

3. Moore would later give the Ehrlichs permission to use

his original title. Apart rom his population control

activism, Moore (–) is best remembered as

the Dixie Cup Company ounder and president. For

a brie biographical sketch, see the Laayette College’s

special archives devoted to the company and its creator<http://ww.aayette.edu/~library/special/dixie/bio.

html>

4. Books published beore whose title reerred to

a “population explosion” include Sax (), Fagley

(), Lenica and Sauvy (), McCormack (),

Nevett (), Park () and Green (). Authors

who used this expression in the collection o essays

published by Osborn () include the historian

Arnold oynbee; the biologist Julian Huxley; the ood

policy analyst, FAO director and Nobel Peace Prize

winner Lord Boyd Orr; the lawyer Grenville Clark; the

soil scientist Walter C. Lowdermilk; the Bishop o theEpiscopal Diocese o Caliornia James A. Pike; and the

essayist Joseph Wood Krutch.

5. Apart rom Robertson (; ),various

mentions and some discussions o key individuals

and organizations can be ound in Allen (), Buell

(), Chase (), Cockburn and St Clair (),

Gibson (), Gottlieb (), Horowitz (),

Jamison and Eyerman (), Linnér (), Luten

(), McCormick (; ), Miller and Santos

(), Rubin (), and Schlosser (orthcoming).

6. While neither Vogt nor Osborn gave much credenceto the idea, anthropogenic inuences on the climate

have been a reason or concern since beore the eighteen

century (von Storch and Stehr ).

7. Tere is much debate as to whether or not, and i

so, how much, Malthus reached more optimistic

conclusions in later editions o his treatise (Malthus

; Petersen ; Luten ; Bradley ).

8. O course, military rulers were always partial to a

growing population rom which new soldiers could be

drawn.

9. Although now mostly associated with the later work

o economist Julian Simon (), the expression

“cornucopian” was already widespread in the s to

characterize individuals who believed that technological

innovation could provide a growing population with

increasingly abundant ood and other valuable resources

(Ciriacy-Wantrup ; Ordway Jr ; Chandrasekhar

). For Simon’s own misgivings about the term, see

Dragos Aligica (this issue).

10. Mather’s () book’s dust jacket cover reads as ollows:

“A leading American scientist surveys the resourceso the earth and concludes that they are adequate to

provide the basis or both reedom and security or all

mankind. In a book that challenges the spirit as well as

the mind, he shows that progress in co-operation will

determine man’s survival.”

11. According to Dana (, p. ): “Conservation as an

organized movement, although not under that label,

started in , when the American Association or

the Advancement o Science appointed a committee

“to memorialize Congress and the several State

legislatures upon the importance o promoting the

cultivation o timber and the preservation o orests,

and to recommend proper legislation or securing these

objects.” Tis action was motivated by ear o a uture

timber amine and by the conviction that such a amine

could be averted only by governmental action.”

12. Osborn’s words were written in the oreword to William

Hornaday’s (, chapter , non-paginated) Our Vanishing Wild Lie in which the author recommended,

among other things, the prohibition o rearms or

aliens whose origins could be traced back to “the lower

classes o southern Europe.” Worse among those were the

Italians who, “wherever they settle… root out the nativeAmerican and take his place and his income. oward

wild lie the Italian laborer is a human mongoose. Give

him power to act, and he will quickly exterminate every

wild thing that wears eathers or hair. o our songbirds

he is literally a ‘pestilence that walketh at noonday’.”

O course, “the great increase in the slaughter o song

birds or ood, by the negroes and poor whites o the

South” had also become “an unbearable scourge to our

migratory birds.”

13. See Gibson (), Glacken (), McCormick

(), Peterson (), Robertson () and Sterling et al. ().

14. Te Osborns were descendants o John Jay and

Cornelius Vanderbilt, while J.P. Morgan was an uncle to




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Osborn’s ather. Tey were also closely associated with

other major American amilies, such as the Rockeeller’s

(Gibson ). Indeed, Osborn Jr. played a major role in

shaping Laurance S. Rockeeller’s environmental outlook

and activities (Winks ). According to all the sources

consulted in the preparation o this essay, Osborn Jr.

rejected the racist outlook o his ather.

15. See also Abernathy (), Gibson (), Robertson

(), Smith () and Sterling et al. ().

16. Te inuences discussed in this section are based on

the content o the texts, ootnotes, bibliographies and

recommended readings ound in both books. See also

Abernathy (), Chase (), Linnér (, pp.

–); Reardon (, p. ) and Vogt (b, p.

).

17. Te title o the American edition was the more prudish

“Vanishing Lands: A World Survey o Soil Erosion.”

18. See Hammond et al . (), McCormick (), and Williams (). Hard-liners in this movement oen

likened native armers to careless, irresponsible and

destructive children. As one o them put it, children

were not “allowed to play with re” even though they

“may very much like to see the ame.” Similarly, more

enlightened administrators should not allow natives to

“play ast and loose with their priceless treasures… well

knowing that the country will be permanently injured

thereby” (Unwin , p. , quoted by Williams ,

p. ).

19. See Bajema (), Berson and Cruz (), Chase

(), Itzko and Lynn () and Stepan, .

20. See Carlson (), Chase (), Connelly (),

Gibson (), Kasanen (this issue) and Morawski

().

21. Dr. Pangloss is a ctional character in Voltaire’s Candidenovel whose naïve optimism is summed up by his motto

“All is or the best in the best o all possible worlds.”

22. Te case o rodents was viewed as more complex,

inasmuch as their presence was more a consequence o

man’s maltreatment o the land.

23. Te ‘lieboat ethics’ is a metaphor or resource

distribution proposed by the ecologist Garrett Hardin() in which a lieboat bearing people with

room or a ew more is in an ocean surrounded by a

hundred swimmers. Te “ethics” o the situation stems

rom the dilemma o whether or not (and under what

circumstances) swimmers should be taken aboard. Te

‘economics o spaceship earth’ metaphor is now mostly

associated with the economist Kenneth E. Boulding

() to reer to the notion o the earth as a spaceship

devoid o unlimited resources in which men must nd

their place in a cyclical ecological system.

24. Te thought that these diseases were becoming more prevalent because other, more lethal, diseases had been

successully addressed doesn’t seem to have occurred to

Osborn.

25. Readers amiliar with the history o economic thought

will recognize echoes o the physiocratic perspective

in Osborn and Vogt’s writings. Interestingly, Vogt (p.

) had this to say on the issue: “Te physiocrats had

perceived the dierence between the symbolic level

and reality, but they were submerged in ‘progress’ and

‘prosperity.’”

26. Vogt had been a salaried employee o the Compañia

Administradora del Guano where he was hired as an

ornithologist to study guano producing birds and to

develop ways to maximize outputs (McCormick ;

Robertson ).

27. Rent-seeking occurs when an individual, organization or

rm seeks to earn money by manipulating the economic

and/or legal environment rather than through trade and

the creation o wealth. ‘Perverse subsidies” have both

economic and environmentally negative impacts.

28. O course, other actors at the time, such as the building o a large Spanish naval orce, also played a role in the

destruction o the Spanish environment.

29. Anderson and Leal () is the most inuential text in

this perspective. Stroup () is a concise discussion.

30. As Bradley (, ) puts it: “Unlike ree-market

capitalism, political capitalism is a variant o the mixed

economy, in which business interests routinely seek,

obtain and use government intervention or their own

advantage, at the expense o consumers, taxpayers, and/

or competitors.”

31. A prime example o the ormer would be Leopold

(). Te quotes discussed in this section are taken or

the most part rom the academic literature. Robertson

() provides more detail on the reception o these

books in the popular press.

32. One could argue that some later reports sponsored

by the US government and Resources or the Future

(Bradley ) were to some extent indirect answers

to Osborn and Vogt. For the purpose o our discussion,

however, we limit ourselves to direct criticisms o their

work.

33. Te “lower ertility o the upper classes” was already

apparent to Adam Smith and Tomas Robert Malthus(Petersen , p. ).

34. Mather’s (, p. ) history o this university’s

department o geography and geology provides much

biographical inormation on Hanson’s career up to his

resignation rom its chairmanship in , including the

act that he “did not hesitate to express his own views

with orce, to argue with acknowledged experts in their

elds, and to press hard or his own belies.”

35. From Vogt, William. Correspondence, –;

Nation (New York, N.Y. : ). Records: Guide;

Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, HarvardUniversity; Call No.: MS Am () http://oasis.

lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou




8

36. Te rst edition o Geography o Hunger was published

in Portuguese in , but the English translation

ollowed the publication o Osborn’s and Vogt’s books

and was modied to address their writings.

37. According to Simon (: ): “Ehrlich and I have

never debated ace to ace. He says that he has reused

because I am a ‘ringe character’.”

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Documents

The Post War Intellectual Roots of the Population Bomb - Fairfield Osborns Our Plundered Planet and William Vogts Road to Survival in Retrospect