#LondonCalling: Paying for Green. @JosephSternberg @WSJOpinion
Nov 03, 2021, 12:53 AM
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Photo: Poster shows a balloonist on horseback suspended from an ascending balloon to advertise balloon ascensions in Vauxhall Gardens, London.
The English writer Thomas Malthus, in his oft-quoted An Essay on the Principle of Population, alarmed much of 18th-century Europe by proposing that an increase in human population beyond sustainable limits would result in a catastrophic plunge in population due to famine and/or disease. Malthus' writings would inform much of the alarm over the "population explosion" roughly 200 years later.
The English writer Thomas Malthus, in his oft-quoted An Essay on the Principle of Population, alarmed much of 18th-century Europe by proposing that an increase in human population beyond sustainable limits would result in a catastrophic plunge in population due to famine and/or disease. Malthus' writings would inform much of the alarm over the "population explosion" roughly 200 years later.
But it was after the colonization of the Americas by Europeans that writers and philosophers were among the first to propose that wilderness had an intrinsic value beyond its usefulness to humans. While fisheries, hunting grounds, and timber stands were important to civilization, visionaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau proposed that "in wildness is the preservation of the world" (Thoreau).
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#LondonCalling: Paying for Green. @JosephSternberg @WSJOpinion