Already straining to host seven billion souls, Earth is set to teem
with billions more, and only a revolution in the use of resources can
avert an environmental crunch, experts say. 
As early as 1798,
Thomas Malthus gloomily forecast that our ability to reproduce would
quickly outstrip our ability to produce food, leading to mass starvation
and a culling of the species.
But an industrial revolution and its impact on agriculture proved Malthus and later doom sayers wrong, even as our numbers doubled and redoubled with accelerating frequency.
"Despite alarmist predictions, historical increases in population have not been economically catastrophic," notes David Bloom, a professor in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard.
Today, though, it seems reasonable to ask if Malthus wasn't simply a couple of centuries ahead of the curve.
On October 31, the world's population is officially scheduled to hit seven billion - a rise of two billion in less than a quarter century.
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As early as 1798,
Thomas Malthus gloomily forecast that our ability to reproduce would
quickly outstrip our ability to produce food, leading to mass starvation
and a culling of the species.But an industrial revolution and its impact on agriculture proved Malthus and later doom sayers wrong, even as our numbers doubled and redoubled with accelerating frequency.
"Despite alarmist predictions, historical increases in population have not been economically catastrophic," notes David Bloom, a professor in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard.
Today, though, it seems reasonable to ask if Malthus wasn't simply a couple of centuries ahead of the curve.
On October 31, the world's population is officially scheduled to hit seven billion - a rise of two billion in less than a quarter century.
