The overpopulation concerns mentioned in Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” in 1959(?) (and by Malthus, to be fair) were repackaged in interesting popular forms in “The Mote in God’s Eye” by Niven and Pournell in 1974 and in “Tuf Voyaging” by George R R Martin in 1986, by which time Ehrlich’s predictions had been proven drastically wrong in timing if not in substance. Interestingly, the Green Revolution, which Ehrlich explicitly dismissed, and which has succeeded in feeding the growing population of the planet, may be represented, discussed and discredited in both these books. In both books, technology is seen as being in a race with the nature of the overbreeding populations: the amazingly technologically advanced aliens which developed independently from humanity in “The Mote in God’s Eye” and a particular planet’s human derived colonist population with a devout belief system that adheres centrally to their own right to breed in “Tuf Voyaging”. In neither case is technology ultimately sufficient to the task, even though both societies are presented as extremely technologically advanced. Thus reiterating the point from “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Hardin, a technological solution is insufficient to the problem of overpopulation. <\/p>\n
One wonders if these novels extract the points purely for entertainment value, or if they are attempting to spread the beliefs to a different audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The overpopulation concerns mentioned in Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” in 1959(?) (and by Malthus, to be fair) were repackaged in interesting popular forms in “The Mote in God’s Eye” by Niven and Pournell in 1974 and in “Tuf Voyaging” by George R R Martin in 1986, by which time Ehrlich’s predictions had been proven drastically … Continue reading “Science Fiction and Environmental Classics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}