by D. Vogt

Created on: June 28, 2010

A Malthusian catastrophe is an event which results from a period of unchecked population growth, according to the theory of overpopulation advanced by Enlightenment demographer Thomas Robert Malthus (and subsequently applied to "peak oil" and other conceptually similar subjects). According to Malthus, a population grows regularly, or geometrically, until it reaches a peak level at which it cannot hope to sustain itself, and then collapses in a cataclysmic event known as a "Malthusian catastrophe."

- About Thomas Malthus and Overpopulation -

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an Englishman who worked as an Anglican clergyman and then as a history professor for the East India Company. He is best known for his "Essay on the Principle of Population," in which Malthus worked out his still-influential theory on the causes and consequences of overpopulation.

According to Malthus, a perfect (or "utopian") society could never develop within a human nation because of the constant cycle of growth, overpopulation, and crisis. Invariably, he argued, technological and other progress would allow human societies to increase the amount of food they could harvest from the same amount of land. This would allow the population to grow. At any given time, according to Malthus, the population of a healthy society was either the maximum number of people who could survive on the food being produced, or was rapidly growing towards that number. The most pessimistic consequence of this perspective was that poverty was more or less inevitable, the human population normally being that which could be sustained on the minimum diet necessary to survive rather than a healthy diet calculated for comfort and good health.

Of course, at the time no countries exercised deliberate population control (and only a few do today, usually with only partial success). For this reason, Malthus argued, there were natural laws which served to restrict population as it bumped up against the maximum viable limits. The most dramatic of these, of course, are those which reduce the population back to more sustainable levels from which growth can re-commence, such as wars (in which soldiers die), famines, and plagues (in which many people die). Typical of Enlightenment scholars, Malthus also argued that once these natural laws were known (as he attempted to do), an intelligently governed society could devise more humane checks and balances on its population levels.

- The Malthusian Catastrophe -

These dramatic and,

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