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Population, technology, and the human environment: a thread through time.

This essay opens by summarizing the life and beliefs of Malthus and noting that the focus of Malthusian concerns has shifted from food and farmland to the carrying capacity of the environment and losses in diversity of life. The dynamics of population resources and technology are then examined in a sequence of four time frames: ages millennia centuries and decades. The consideration of "ages" relates population surges to mankinds three technological revolutions and rejects the familiar curves of exponential growth over centuries of world population. The study of "millennia" reveals that the population of regions over thousands of years resembles "millennial long waves" of growth and decline which disappear in the global scale of ages. Populations are reconstructed for the Egyptian Nile Valley the Tigris-Euphrates lowlands the Basin of Mexico and the central Mayan lowlands of Mexico and Guatemala. The examination of "centuries" reveals patterns changing from high births and high deaths to low births and low deaths for one of the following reasons: 1) less need for child labor and more need for educated children; 2) more children survive; 3) less time for childbearing and rearing; and 4) more access to birth control. The final focus on decades predicts that the decades ahead will prove to be the "Great Climacteric." The validity of projected fertility rates and world population projections is considered as are the consequences of these numbers for technology and development. The study of "ages" indicates that we are about halfway through the third great population surge. The study of "millennia" reveals that great civilizations of the past failed to maintain much smaller growth rates.