Thomas Robert Malthus, a man so praised and vilified that his name has been immortalised in the noun “Malthusianism”. Many people will have heard of him in the context of overpopulation, but how many of you know the title of his famous book? Robert J. Mayhew is a Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History and with Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet he makes the case that Malthus’s book is a good example of the unread classic. Deeply researched, this is a scholarly book for the patient reader that charts Malthus’s life and, especially, his intellectual legacy. As Mayhew shows, Malthus remains as relevant as ever, though he continues to be misinterpreted in manifold ways.
Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet, written by Robert J. Mayhew, published by Harvard University Press in April 2014 (paperback, 284 pages)
Malthus’s book An Essay on the Principle of Population was originally published in 1798, followed by a much-reworked second edition in 1803. Yale University Press reissued it with supporting essays four years after this book. To understand its stormy reception, Mayhew starts with two chapters sketching the life and economy of Malthus’s England in the decades leading up to 1800, as well as the social and intellectual climate into which his book was born. In particular, Mayhew highlights the French Revolution of 1789 and how it shaped the thinking of scholars such as Richard Price, Marquis de Condorcet, and William Godwin. Concerns about population and food scarcity were already in the air, though little empirical or census data were available.
Malthus and his work only make their entrance in chapter 3, which charts his education and the period leading up to the publication of the first edition, while chapter 5 explores Malthus “the environmental economist”. As Mayhew clarifies, though, it is misleading of me to call him that. His work was a precursor leading to that discipline, but Malthus did, for example, not consider air, water, or ecosystems as limiting resources. It took “the extractive volumes of the twentieth century” before these were taken along in economic analyses. These two chapters are really the biographical part of this book (a fuller biography is given in Population Malthus). Throughout, Mayhew highlights Malthus’s humane side and his caution, assiduousness, and empiricism in collecting more data to prepare the 1803 rewrite.
“Malthus “the environmental economist” […] is misleading […] his work was a precursor leading to that discipline.”
The remainder of the book deals with Malthus’s intellectual legacy in a chronological fashion. Mayhew mentions how “the tracks of intellectual history are not so straight and simple as to lead from Wordsworth to the Green Party, and from Malthus to capitalism and climate change”. The body of scholarship on Malthus and his influence spans many decades and Mayhew mines it deeply to show convincingly how Malthus’s thinking has been applied to different concerns over time. The below-mentioned are just some of the themes and players.
Mayhew starts with the fierce criticism from the Romantics, such as the Lake Poets (including Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and the Marlow school (including Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron), whose utopian Enlightenment thinking on human perfectibility clashed with Malthus’s vision. After his death in 1834, with the Industrial Revolution well underway, Victorian thinkers such as John Ruskin, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx took aim at him, though for different reasons. Simultaneously, he inspired both Darwin and Wallace, shaping evolutionary theory. And this era also saw the birth of the term “Malthusian” with the foundation of the Malthusian League, a society dedicated to making birth control a respectable topic.
“scholarship on Malthus […] spans many decades and Mayhew mines it deeply to show convincingly how Malthus’s thinking has been applied to different concerns over time”
As an aside, Mayhew’s writing in these early chapters is quite rich. He threads together long sentences with quotes from original works that, given the style of the time, are no less wordy. But it is Mayhew’s vocabulary that stands out; advocates of war are bellicose, warrants for arrest are promulgated, complaints are valetudinarian, critics vituperative, and Malthus’s first job was in homiletics. I initially had to keep a dictionary at hand, though the purple prose lets up considerably as the book progresses.
Mayhew argues that there are good reasons to expect Malthus’s star to have waned as the 1900s rolled around. Economics matured as a discipline to the point that his insights were absorbed but his words went unread, birth control advocates disconnected themselves from his name, and birth rates declined in Europe, not least because of the loss of life in World War I. But this period also saw the rise of eugenics, economic depression (John Maynard Keynes was important here), Churchill’s perhaps little-known role in the Bengal famine in India in 1942-1943, and, of course, Hitler’s fascism. All of these drew on the work of Malthus in one way or another.
“After World War II […] biologists and ecologist […] joined the fray and starting penning many gloomy tracts”
After World War II, the US played a notable role in keeping Malthus’s flame alive, his work inspiring writers such as Isaac Asimov and Anthony Burgess, while remaining centre-stage in scholarly debates. But it was especially biologists and ecologist who now joined the fray and starting penning many gloomy tracts. Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb is the most infamous, but far from the only one. It was the time of Apollo 8’s famous Earthrise photo, the popularisation of the phrase “Spaceship Earth“, and the publication of the Club of Rome’s influential report. In turn, demographers and economists pushed back relentlessly, notably Julian Simon. Interestingly, though, he mostly had a bone to pick with the late-20th Century neo-Malthusians rather than with Malthus himself.
That brings Mayhew to our time. The concerns may have shifted to climate change, the Anthropocene, and (after this book was published) Extinction Rebellion, but Malthus continues to underpin this thinking. Of note is the rise of the field of “environmental security” that links population, climate, agriculture, and culture. It sees policymakers worrying about climate refugees and food crises. And, of course, there is continued pushback on the topic of overpopulation.
Clearly, Malthus is here to stay, which is why this book is so important. With the 1803 edition of the Essay readily available again, there is no excuse not to read Malthus’s own words. But to help readers properly understand and contextualize his work and its legacy, a good biography is invaluable, making the deeply researched Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet required reading. Keeping in mind above remarks about the writing, I do think this is for the patient reader, but they should find it a very rewarding book.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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“The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future“, written by David Wallace-Wells, published in Europe by Allen Lane in February 2019 (hardback, 310 pages)
The Uninhabitable Earth expands on the essay published in New York magazine in July 2017. The piece quickly attracted criticism from climate scientists for being rather cavalier with its facts. Amidst the many responses, a useful summary is the piece published by science education NGO Climate Feedback in which 17 prominent climate scientists evaluated the essay. To its credit, New York magazine was quick to publish an annotated edition.
The near future sketched in the first half of The Uninhabitable Earth is one of a planet tortured by epic wildfires, rising sea levels, megadroughts, famines, acidifying oceans, polluted air, and rising temperatures amidst which hundreds of millions of climate refugees wander a planet in the throes of collapsing economies and emerging conflicts. In short, Wallace-Wells would like you to know that, unless urgent action is undertaken to combat climate change, we are all royally fucked.
He is not the first to sound a desperate alarm, and his book joins a budding subgenre that some critics disparagingly label “climate porn”. James Hansen, the well-known climate scientist who has chastised colleagues for not speaking up out of fear of being labeled alarmist, has done so before (see Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity), while others have declared the fight over (see Too Late: How We Lost the Battle with Climate Change or Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future). Some climate scientists are annoyed by what they perceive as scaremongering, arguing that frightening people will result in fatalism rather than galvanizing them. I guess people will respond in different ways, and recent climate protests suggest that his approach certainly works for some. Either way, Wallace-Wells does not mind being called alarmist, his (touché) defence is that he is alarmed, and you should be too.
“[…] Wallace-Wells would like you to know that, unless urgent action is undertaken to combat climate change, we are all royally fucked.”
Now, Wallace-Wells openly states he calls on predictions, on science that is in flux as new findings come to light. Even if he gets some of the details wrong, the overall pattern is pretty clear. As I have written elsewhere (see my reviews of The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions and The Oceans: A Deep History), the findings from palaeoclimatology leave little doubt as to what happens when you keep pumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The author brings together many poignant observations. Global warming is not a moral and economic debt that has been accumulating since the Industrial Revolution – about half of all fossil fuels have been burned in only the last three decades. And our epoch could very well be a blip on the timeline, the result of a gigantic one-off injection of fossil fuel into our economy, allowing us to live in a temporary mirage of “endless and on-demand abundance for the world’s wealthy” (I told you he was poetic).
“[…] our epoch could very well be a blip on the timeline, the result of a gigantic one-off injection of fossil fuel into our economy”
The Uninhabitable Earth is not a book of solutions though, and Wallace-Wells spends a good part of the second half of the book railing against what he thinks will not work. Against the hallucinatory fantasies of Silicon Valley who hope to escape into a virtual reality, uploading their consciousness into computers. Against as-of-yet hypothetical technofixes such as carbon capture and storage or negative emissions technology. Against ecological nihilism by burned-out environmentalists such as Paul Kingsnorth (see Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist). If you want practical advice, you are better off reading There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years.
The Dutchman in me can appreciate his in-your-face polemic style. This is why I am surprised he overlooks one vital aspect: overpopulation. As soon as this topic comes up, Wallace-Wells seems blindsided. Part of him is excited for his daughter and the world she will inhabit, one which will be “doing battle with a genuinely existential threat”. This seems mildly perverse given the litany of terrors he lays out in this book. And those who abstain from having children over their concerns for a world ravaged by climate change “demonstrate a strain of strange ascetic pride”.
“For a book that prides itself on its fierce frankness, not addressing overpopulation feels like a serious omission.”
One problem I have with this line of argumentation, that our lifestyle and economy are wrecking the planet, is that it ignores numbers. Yes, our ancestors were not despoiling the planet, but I would argue it was not for want of trying, but for want of numbers. Now, I have no data to back this assertion up with, so I am going out on a limb here, but how much damage do you think a population of 7 billion stone age hunter-gatherers would have inflicted on the planet? Or 7 billion people trying their hand at farming some ten thousand years ago? I would not at all be surprised that if you work out the numbers, the reason our ancestors did not bring about climate change has more to do with their lack of numbers than with a lack of impact of their lifestyle.
And Wallace-Wells comes so close when he observes that most emissions have only happened in the last three decades. Could it be that the doubling of our world population has something to do with this? For a book that prides itself on its fierce frankness, not addressing overpopulation feels like a serious omission. It is a thorny topic (see my review of Should We Control World Population?), but if you want to talk solutions, addressing it should be a vital part of a multi-pronged approach he envisions to avoid the bleak future sketched here.
The Uninhabitable Earth is lyrical and stirring, but also controversial and not without its flaws. Is taking the predictions of climate change impacts to their logical extremes a valuable exercise? I am left feeling conflicted. I can sympathise with the urge to want to grab people by the scruff of the neck, but whether it ultimately is constructive is something I am not fully convinced of.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however. This review has been slightly edited since its publication to emphasize that I consider the author frank rather than alarmist.
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“Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations“, written by Anthony J. McMichael and edited by Alistair Woodward and Cameron Muir, published by Oxford University Press in February 2017 (hardback, 370 pages)
Anthony J. McMichael was an epidemiologist associated with various renowned academic institutes during his life and advised the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the link between climate change and health (see this obituary for a fuller description of his many achievements and contributions). With the manuscript for this book accepted for publication, he suddenly passed away in September 2014. Alistair Woodward and Cameron Muir took up the torch and saw the book through to publication.
There is obviously increasing concern what future climate change will have in store for humanity and the planet at large. And there is no shortage of dire predictions of more frequent extreme weather events, sea level rise, impact on agriculture, and the risk of disrupted food production accompanied by conflict and unrest. This is not mere idle speculation or hypothetical model forecasting, says McMichael. Our past is littered with episodes where natural climatic changes caused all sorts of misery. The key to understanding what might come next lies in an understanding of our past.
“Our past is littered with episodes where natural climatic changes caused crop failures, famines, warfare and the demise of civilizations.”
The first few chapters give the reader all the relevant background knowledge needed. McMichael introduces the various mechanisms that cause longer and shorter-term climate fluctuations, from Milankovitch cycles to decadal oscillations such as El Niño. The result, as I mentioned in my review of The Oceans: A Deep History, is a fiendishly complex system of feedback loops. He gives an overview of the various direct and indirect health impacts that climate change can have, and provides a short history of the rise of humans and the beginning of agriculture (see also my review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States). McMichael speaks of the Faustian bargain we unwittingly made by transitioning from nomadism to farming. Palaeopathology has documented how our health suffered due to our change in diet (see Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death, or my review of Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins), but this new sedentary lifestyle also made us more vulnerable to climatic changes.
The centrepiece of the book is his synthesis of some 11,000 years of environmental history. Starting with early civilizations in or near the Nile Valley, he walks us through the civilizations of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Hittites, and, in the Indus Valley, the Harappans. For most of these, the lack of written records means that we have pieced together their history from archaeological and palaeoclimatological data. We have a far more detailed picture of the rise and fall of Roman, Mayan, and Anasazi civilizations, and, later, of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300-1850), the eruption of Mount Tambora, and the Irish potato blight. Throughout, McMichael summarises how droughts, floods, or changing temperatures are linked to famines, the spread of diseases, warfare, mass migrations (whether as climate refugees or as groups hell-bent on conquest), and, ultimately, the fate of empires.
“McMichael speaks of the Faustian bargain we unwittingly made by transitioning from nomadism to farming.”
Now, there is a vast literature on the link between climate and human history, so this book necessarily takes a bird’s eye view. Next to the academic literature, you could build a small library with more popular books from the likes of Jared Diamond (see Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive) and especially Brian Fagan (see The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, and Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations). Early eras are covered in, for example, Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos, but there are also excellent books on Roman civilization (see my review of The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire), the Little Ice Age (see The Little Ice Age and my review of Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age Transformed the West and Shaped the Present), and the impact of the Tambora eruption (see Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World and Tambora and the Year without a Summer: How a Volcano Plunged the World into Crisis).
What sets this book apart is the synthesis of this vast and fascinating topic, making it a good starting point, and its explicit link to health and disease. Off the top of my head, the only other book that does something similar is Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey, but McMichael’s background as an epidemiologist and his work for the IPCC position him very well to tell this story.
One of the things I liked was the author’s caution throughout the book. So, when he mentions the possible impact on our very early history of the Toba eruption (see my review of When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano) or the question whether the Black Death in 16th-Century Europe was actually caused by bubonic plague (see for example Return of the Black Death: The World’s Greatest Serial Killer or Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations), he gives a brief overview of why these ideas are considered controversial. When, in the final chapters, it comes to forecasts and lessons for the future, he is similarly moderate. Never before has our population reached such large numbers, and to see comparable levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide we have to go back tens of millions of years in palaeoclimatological records. So, without downplaying the important lessons that history holds for the future, in some ways the future is not like the past.
“even though I am familiar with [this topic], the way it is brought together and puts time into perspective still gave me near-vertigo.”
The dumb thing is, even though I am familiar with all the individual pieces McMichael lays out here, the way it is brought together and puts time into perspective still gave me near-vertigo. Clearly, no empire ever looked much ahead or entertained the idea of their demise until it was almost upon them. McMichael highlights how evolution, always aiming to help organisms survive the now, has left us poorly equipped to plan for the longer-term. While the full story of most civilizations has spun itself out over many centuries, our “Great Acceleration” and the growth of the world’s population from 1.5 to 7+ billion people took just decades (see my review of The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945).
Even if, for the sake of argument, human-induced climate change was not on the menu, have we, through our technological advances, created a robust society able to weather climate fluctuations far into the future? Or have we mindlessly expanded to the maximum carrying capacity allowed by our environment? I think we all know the answer to that (see also my review of Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want it Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future). It is a tall order to look at the totality of the picture revealed here and remain as optimistic as the author – though his mindset does not take away from the urgency of his message.
The only minor quibble I have with this book is that some of the sourced illustrations were designed with colour in mind and have here been reproduced in greyscale, limiting their usefulness. That notwithstanding, Climate Change and the Health of Nations is a fascinating and thorough synthesis that shows how history holds many valuable lessons for those willing to listen. The book is also a fitting testament to McMichael’s long career, and Woodward and Muir, as well as the publisher, are to be commended for making sure this book saw the light of day.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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