Debating Malthus: A Documentary Reader on Population, Resources, and the Environment (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0295749903 ISBN 13: 9780295749907

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2022

Synopsis

Introducing students to the place of population in environmental thinking

For centuries, thinking about the earth's increasing human population has been tied to environmental ideas and political action. This highly teachable collection of contextualized primary sources allows students to follow European and North American discussions about intertwined and evolving concepts of population, resources, and the natural environment from early contexts in the sixteenth century through to the present day.

Edited and introduced by Robert J. Mayhew, a noted biographer of Thomas Robert Malthus―whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), excerpted here, is an influential and controversial take on the topic―this volume explores themes including evolution, eugenics, war, social justice, birth control, environmental Armageddon, and climate change. Other responses to the idea of new "population bombs" are represented here by radical feminist work, by Indigenous views of the population-environment nexus, and by intersectional race-gender approaches. By learning the patterns of this discourse, students will be better able to critically evaluate historical conversations and contemporary debates.

About this title

About the Authors

Robert J. Mayhew is Senior Tutor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is author of Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2014) editor of New Perspectives on Malthus (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and coeditor of Geographies of Knowledge: Science, Scale, and Spatiality in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

Paul Sutter is series editor for the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. He is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published five books, including Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (University of Washington Press, 2005) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (University of Georgia Press, 2015).

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295749903
• ISBN 13: 9780295749907
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 278
• Editor: Mayhew Robert J.