The purpose of this study is to review the literature on population and environment to identify the main strands of thought and the salient features and assumptions that lie behind them, and to guide the reader through what is a very diverse and confusing, yet rapidly expanding, field of study. We begin with a review of the historical perspective from Malthus and his capitalist and socialist critics, through Boserup’s thesis and other neoclassical economists, to the recent ideological war between the “neo-Malthusians” and the “cornucopians.” .
