Climate Change, Migration and Inequality are not Problems: They are Symptoms

In the early days of homo-sapiens communities would remain in one place until the ability of the land to support them ran out. Then they would move on. We call them Nomads and it is a way of life still adopted by a few.

A couple of centuries ago a man called Thomas Malthus pointed out that the population generally was rising faster than the ability of the land to sustain it. The catastrophe he forecast hasn’t happened for a number of reasons, principal among them migration. In the nineteenth century there was still plenty of undeveloped land available in North America and Australia. Europeans migrated there in significant numbers.

Meanwhile the productivity of agriculture was vastly increased thanks to herbicides, insecticides, plant breeding programmes and modern machinery.

But in Malthus’s time the population of the planet was well under a billion. Today it is approaching 8 billion. And whilst there are still areas of undeveloped land yet to be cultivated, to do so will have unacceptable consequences for the environment. Indeed, the destruction of areas of rain forest that has already occurred is widely recognised as having exacerbated such phenomena as rising sea levels. And the continuing use of agri-chemicals is known to be responsible for environmental hazards such as the pollution of water sources and the threatened demise of key pollinators.