Climate

17 Pages 4274 Words

trophic occurrences to divine intervention (he was a very religious man, a clergyman, in fact). He believed that such natural outcomes were essentially God’s way of preventing man from being lazy.
The point here is not to provide an evaluation of Malthus, and one might well argue that he was wrong in many of his predictions; but rather to highlight the posit that man has long been living beyond his means. Sooner or later, this will have its consequences. As a species, our success has certainly been impressive, but it has come by turning a blind-eye to our surroundings. “A prime reason for our success is our flexibility as a switcher predator and scavenger. We are consummately adaptable, able to switch form one resource base—grasslands, forests or estuaries—to another, as each is exploited to its maximum tolerance or use up. Like other successful species we have learned to adapt ourselves to new environments. But, unlike other animals, we made a jump from being successful to being a runaway success. We have made this jump becaus...