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The dominant contemporary narrative of environmental change and human–environment interaction is a well‐established one with a long history. In Western Europe since the late 1700s, when human influence and response to the environment was first submitted to scientific scrutiny, the central driving explanation for social/ecological crisis has been increasing human population, measured in absolute numbers. Following from Thomas Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population, the argument is straightforward: as human populations grow out of proportion to the capacity of the environmental system to support them, there is a crisis both for humans, whose numbers fall through starvation and disease‐based mortality, and for nature, whose overused assets are driven past the point of self‐renewal. This argument took many forms during the twentieth century, from the Population Bomb of Paul Ehrlich (1968) to the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), but its elements are consistent. All hold to the ultimate scarcity of non‐human nature and the rapacity of humankind's growing numbers.

For ecoscarcity proponents, this is nowhere a more serious problem than that in the underdeveloped world, where growth rates and absolute numbers of people remain the highest in the world. That the poorest regions of the world are the repositories for what are viewed as important and scarce environmental goods makes the problem doubly serious. In this way of thinking, the perilous decline of Kenya's wildlife, as described above, can be predicted to follow inevitably from the growth of Kenya's population.

The problems with this line of argument are many. In general terms, and as will be shown throughout this book, the demographic explanation is a consistently weak predictor of environmental crisis and change. First, this is because the mitigating factors of affluence and technology tend to overwhelm the force of crude numbers. A very few members of the global village, after all, consume the majority of its resources (Table 1.2).

Table 1.2 Who is overpopulated? Comparative per capita consumption of resources and production of waste.

(Data adapted from World Resources Institute 2005).

Resource	India	United States
Meat (kg, 2009)a	4	120
Water (m3, 1996–2005)b	1,089	2,842
Energy (kg oil equivalent, 2013)c	606	6,915
Carbon emissions (metric tons, 2013)c	1.6	16.4

India is three times larger than the United States, in terms of population, but consumes a comparatively tiny quantity of key resources and produces a fractional amount of waste.

^a Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

^b Water Footprint Network (http://waterfootprint.org/en/resources/water‐footprint‐statistics/#CP3)

^c World Bank – World Development Indicators

The more fundamental problem with this formulation, however, is that it posits the environment as a finite source of basic unchanging and essential elements, which set absolute limits for human action. However intuitive (divide a limited stock of earth materials by a potentially infinite hungry human population and the result always approaches zero), this assumption has proved historically false and conceptually flawed.

Market “optimists,” expressing the problem in economic terms, suggest that any form of resource scarcity creates a response that averts serious crisis. As a good becomes scarcer, they suggest, its price tends to rise, which results either in the clever use of substitutes and new technologies to increase efficiency, or in a simple decreased demand for that good. The result is that apparently finite resources are stretched to become infinitely available as consumers use less and producers supply more efficient alternatives and substitutes (Rees 1990). Even if populations rise on a limited land area, for example, the demand for land and rising land rents will increase its efficiency of use, with more and better production on each unit of land. Even if petroleum becomes scarce, the rising price per barrel will encourage the use of otherwise expensive alternatives like wind and solar power, or simply cause consumers to drive less, endlessly stretching the world's energy supply. While such optimistic prognoses are themselves fraught with problems, they do point to an important and increasingly well‐accepted truism: resources are constructed rather than given.

Finally, the overall global trajectory of population is actually headed in the reverse direction from that predicted by Malthusian catastrophists. As of 2017, more than half the countries of the world were in a state of population decline, where fertility rates have fallen to less than the replacement rate (approximately 2.1 children per family). The seriousness of this transition is notable insofar as the greatest challenge for many countries in demographic decline is labor scarcity, not a surplus of people (Robbins and Smith 2017).

Since it was first offered up in Malthus' 1793 formulation, the ecoscarcity argument has been presented as an explicit justification for social policy. In particular, Malthus insisted that since famine and starvation were essential to controlling runaway human populations, such events are “natural” and inevitable. England's Poor Laws, the modest redistributive welfare subsidies to feed the most marginal groups, were pointless and counter‐environmental. By increasing rather than decreasing their numbers, such subsidies were the source rather than the solution of misery (Malthus 1992, book 4, ch. 3, p. 227).

The implications for contemporary global environmentalism are equally programmatic. Environmental crises as demographic problems exist at the site of resource use, in and amongst the world's poor, who are simply too numerous. Subsidies of the poor do little to alleviate the crisis, since they only serve to reinforce the demographic trend. Population control, rather than reconfiguration of global distributions of power and goods, is the solution to ecological crisis. The continued advocacy of an apolitical natural‐limits argument, therefore, is implicitly political, since it holds implications for the distribution and control of resources. Even so, Malthusianism regrettably remains a typical way of thinking about environmental change, and so provides a unifying target for many political ecologists.