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221 Three questions have driven this study: What caused the wave of Malthusian concern about population growth and environmental problems that swept over the United States in the twentieth century, especially after World War II? How large a role did this wave play in postwar American society and especially the birth of the environmental movement? What impact did Malthusianism leave on the environmental movement and the way Americans today understand interactions between humans and their natural surroundings? From a historical perspective, it’s remarkable that so many Americans ever grew so concerned about population growth. Although Europeans had often blamed poverty and scarcity on overpopulation, Americans had typically seen the world as a place of abundance—at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Few early Americans would have predicted that the United States would see a wave of Malthusian concern sweep through the country. The same could be said looking back from the last two decades of the twentieth century. In 1990, after all the recent disputes about population growth, it would have been hard to imagine that only twenty years earlier many Americans, including top officials of both major parties, had made reducing population growth one of their main concerns. How did this happen? My argument is that from the 1940s to the early 1970s, an unusual alignment of historical forces—international and domestic, material and cultural— made Malthusianism very attractive, and then in the 1970s these forces mostly dissipated. Among the most important factors were physical changes, both in the environment and populations. The global ecosystem changed dramatically from 1900 to 2000, and one of the most obvious changes was in the number of homo sapiens walking the earth. Never before had the number of humans on the planet been as high or grown as fast as between 1950 and 1990. Because of the baby boom and a drop in mortality, the American population Conclusion The Power and Pitfalls of Biology during these same years also set records for both absolute numbers and growth rates. Dramatic international events directed a powerful spotlight on these material changes. World War II showed the importance of interconnection, and as the country’s diplomats and businessmen searched a shrinking world for resources, markets, and political allies during the Cold War decades, many people grew increasingly worried that poverty-induced political instability would draw the nation into another global war. War and fear of war lay behind the explosion of concern about population. Many saw population growth as a source of instability abroad and a potential threat to U.S. national security and abundance. Those who grew the most worried thought not just about resource imbalances but also about the declining capacity of the planet to provide high-quality resources. The first to make such arguments were Raymond Pearl and Edward Murray East, who in the wake of World War I recognized that not only increased demand but also limited and declining capacity posed worrisome problems. Concerns escalated after World War II, when the United States replaced Great Britain as the world’s strongest power in an international system that was more interlinked economically and politically than ever before. Surveying the wreckage of the war, William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn pushed the architects of the new world order to not ignore the environmental imbalances that they believed had first ignited the recent wars. In subsequent decades, because of the Cold War, environmental issues and even reproductive patterns in places such as India and Indonesia became issues of U.S. national security. Geopolitical competition spread to the far corners of the planet but also insinuated itself into each and every aspect of domestic life, as well. This period was marked by not just its globalness but also its totalness. In the name of the national security, the United States mobilized and monitored the material resources of much of the country and even much of the planet. It should not come as a surprise that some mid-twentieth century conservationists began speaking of our “total” environment. During the 1950s and 1960s, new technologies greatly affected the balance of people and resources. Many people—especially top American policymakers— placed tremendous faith in spreading modern technologies, especially programs to increase food supply through green-revolution hybrid seeds. Big changes also occurred in the history of reproduction, including new birth-control technologies such as the birth-control pill and the intrauterine device, as well as new attitudes about sex and women’s roles. These new technologies...

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