The missing links: the population-environment debate in historical perspective.

This draft report focuses on the historical context of the debate about population growth and its impact on the environment. Philosophical and scientific debates on population and resources occurred during the periods of 1750-1880 with the growth of industrialization and 1880-1940 with peak European industrial growth eventual imperial decline and political instability and collective violence. The styles of thinking and 4 kinds of environment are described. It is a priority not to confine thinking to a reductionist mode. Selected historical examples in Western intellectual and scientific traditions show how one theme or motif was selected to explain contemporary ills. For example Marx blamed enclosures and capital accumulation and his solution was proletarian insurrection; for Emile Zola the migration to the seductions of urban life was the problem and his solution was to return to the individual and national dignity of agrarian life. The common tendency was to show "a mythical past of harmonious labor and individual dignity remote from industrial conflict and social degradation." The rural/urban motif has sustained itself over the past 2 centuries. There is also an adversarial mentality "negative reference thinking" to counteract the pastoral imagery which to make its point becomes exclusive and denies important facets. Restrictive thinking is an obsession of what is construed to be scientific laws and objectivity. Marxs approach was to be considered scientific not utopian as it really was. Academic specialization also promoted restrictive thinking in its adherence to the craft exclusive language and interpretations of research findings. Environment is construed to be a global ecosystem; all natural resources particularly energy and food; a cultural motif of urban vs rural with its pastoral biases; and an antonym of "social heredity". Economic thinking denied environmental and natural resource questions. Fertility was only a biological phenomena. Environmentalists deny the differences between human and animal populations and the potential of new technologies for expanding the resource base.