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David Wallace-Wells
Thomas Malthus was an economist born in the 18th century who predicted that long-term economic growth would be impossible in the face of long-term population growth. Malthus suggested people should reproduce less in order to ensure that there would be enough resources to go around. His controversial predictions have long been considered extreme and bleak, but given the rate of warming on Earth today, many climatologists now find themselves wondering about Earth’s “carrying capacity,” or just how much larger of a population the planet can realistically support.
Thomas Malthus Quotes in The Uninhabitable Earth
The The Uninhabitable Earth quotes below are all either spoken by Thomas Malthus or refer to Thomas Malthus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part II, Chapter 2: Hunger
Quotes
Global warming, in other words, is more than just one input in an equation to determine carrying capacity; it is the set of conditions under which all of our experiments to improve that capacity will be conducted. In this way, climate change appears to be not merely one challenge among many facing a planet already struggling with civil strife and war and horrifying inequality and far too many other insoluble hardships to iterate, but the all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met—a whole sphere, in other words, which literally contains within it all of the world's future problems and all of its possible solutions.
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Thomas Malthus Quotes in The Uninhabitable Earth
The The Uninhabitable Earth quotes below are all either spoken by Thomas Malthus or refer to Thomas Malthus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part II, Chapter 2: Hunger
Quotes
Global warming, in other words, is more than just one input in an equation to determine carrying capacity; it is the set of conditions under which all of our experiments to improve that capacity will be conducted. In this way, climate change appears to be not merely one challenge among many facing a planet already struggling with civil strife and war and horrifying inequality and far too many other insoluble hardships to iterate, but the all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met—a whole sphere, in other words, which literally contains within it all of the world's future problems and all of its possible solutions.
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