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By Prof. Bruno COLMANT, Ph.D., Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium
I am not stumbling over a neo-Malthusian vision about the British economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who predicted that without restraint, the population grows exponentially or geometrically while resources grow only arithmetically. I do not dismiss the incredible power of human ingenuity either. Nevertheless, the ardor of the market economy is outpacing the pace of collective action to temper its excesses.
We should not be prophets of doom, but there is no guarantee that we will avoid a new global hysteria exacerbated by overpopulation. It took 200,000 years to reach the first billion humans, and the year I was born, in 1961, there were 3 billion humans compared to 8...
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