The past two hundred years have witnessed two exploding trends: rapid population growth following the decline in mortality due to both the medical revolution and the improvement in living conditions and a steep increase of resource depletion and environmental degradation following the industrial and agricultural revolutions. Both of these trends have accelerated over the past 50 years, fueling the debate on the linkages between population and environment that began 150 years earlier with Malthus’ concern about the capacity of fixed land to feed an exponentially growing population
