GEOG 3020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Cash Crop, Grey Literature, Malthusianism
Document Summary
Population as a driver of environmental degradation: as population goes up, the environment is degraded. Malthus: an economist that wrote an essay not he principle of population (1798). He stated that population will outstrip resources producing scarcity. Population will grow geometrically and f grows arithmetically. Malthusianism: war, starvation and disease are natural limits to growth. Poor are at fault for their own poverty and it requires a moral code of self-restraint but only for working and poor classes. Policy implications such as the famine in india. South as a main obstacle to sustainable development. Those who are poor and hungry will often destroy their immediate environment in order to survive. They cut down forests their livestock will overgraze grasslands; they will overuse marginal land and in growing numbers they will crowd into congested cities. Developing countries will also have to promote direct measures to reduce fertility to avoid going radically beyond the productive potential to support their populations.
