Freethink Media on the Folly of the Overpopulation Panic
The creative techno-optimists over at Freethink Media have just released an excellent video looking back at one of the biggest controversies of the 20th Century. The fact that we don’t usually still talk about it is a testament to human achievement and a caution about believing doomsday predictions.
The issue was overpopulation, and the inevitable (or so we were told) cycle of starvation and misery that would result from their being too many people in the world. The smartest experts the United Nations could assemble told us all that a human tidal wave would swamp our civilization and leave us all fighting over the basics of survival in the near future.
The video above explains how we avoided that scenario, in particular highlighting the work of one exceptional human being, the recipient of CEI’s Prometheus Award for Human Achievement in 2004, Norman Borlaug. Norm didn’t do it alone, of course, but his research, insight, and optimism played a huge role in providing a much safer and healthier world today than most experts thought would be possible back in the 1970s.