“What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us . . . . In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.”
This was not written by professional doomsayer Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb,1968). It is not found in the catastrophist works of Donella and Dennis Meadows (The Limits to Growth, 1972; Beyond the Limits, 1992). Nor did it come from the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State’s pessimistic assessment of the world situation, The Global 2000 Report to the President (1980).
It did not even come from Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on Population (1798) in the late eighteenth century is the seminal work to which much of the modern concern about overpopulation can be traced. And it did not come from Botero, a sixteenth-century Italian whose work anticipated many of the arguments advanced by Malthus two centuries later.
The opening quotation was penned by Tertullian, a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century, when the population of the world was about 190 million, or only three to four percent of what it is today. And the fear of overpopulation did not begin with Tertullian. One finds similar concerns expressed in the writings of Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., as well as in the teachings of Confucius as early as the sixth century B.C.
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