Page 39 - BBC Focus - August 2017

THE NEWS IS NEVER SHORT OF

HEADLINES TELLING US THAT

ANOTHER RESOURCE IS ABOUT

TO RUN OUT. BUT ECONOMIST

AND CONSERVATIVE PEER MATT

RIDLEY ARGUES THAT HISTORY

SUGGESTS OUR FUTURE MIGHT

BE BRIGHTER THAN YOU THINK…

S teller’s sea cow was a most people on Earth, together with their domestic
animals, use a large proportion of the planet’s
unusual beast. The
herbivorous, cold-water-
resources. They have already caused the
dwelling relative of dugongs
extinction of many species. According to Prof
and manatees was
Helmut Haberl of Austria’s Klagenfurt University,
discovered in 1741 by Georg
about 14 per cent of all the new green vegetation
ILLUSTRATION: STEPHAN WALTER/DEBUT ART Rich in blubber and meat, slow-moving and or prevented from growing at all. It’s hard to find
on the planet is eaten by us and our tame animals
Steller when he and his
each year, while another 9 per cent is destroyed
shipmates were marooned
on the uninhabited Bering
an ecosystem we have not affected.
Island in the North Pacific.
For several decades it has been a staple of the
environmental movement that this cannot last,
unafraid, this 10-ton, kelp-eating creature proved
a tempting target to hunters that winter and in
that resources will be exhausted, causing the
collapse of civilisation. The first worry was that
the years that followed. Within three decades of
land would run out, this being the central
its discovery it was extinct.
concern of the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus in his
This is a tempting metaphor for the impact of
famous 1798 book An Essay On The Principle 2
human beings on the planet. The seven billion
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