Libel on the Human Race
Steven Shapin: Malthus, 5 June 2014
Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet
by Robert Mayhew.
Harvard, 284 pp., £20, April 2014,978 0 674 72871 4 Show More
by Robert Mayhew.
Harvard, 284 pp., £20, April 2014,
“... crops and livestock more productive; the introduction of herbicides and pesticides; the so-called Green Revolution of the 1950s; and maybe the yield-increasing, drought and disease-resisting effects of genetically modified crops (if we’re willing to eat them). In Malthus’s time, it took twenty thousand square metres of agricultural land to feed one ... ”