ery religious man, a clergyman, in fact). He believed that such natural outcomes were essentially Gods 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 basegrasslands, forests or estuariesto 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 because of our ability to adapt environments for our own uses in ways that no other animal can match. Whether or not man can continue to adapt to the emerging environment, however, is a difficult question. In a (literally) rapidly changing world, it is difficult to look back on past or present to divine the future. But, using Malthus line of reasoning, one way or another mother nature will surely take care of us. Lack of resources, environmental degradation, famine and disease will in the painful fashion known by our ancestors cut our species back. AIDS is the obvious example of a way in which to do it....Conditions already exist in several African countries for the virus to kill more people than are being born...However, with its incubation period of as much as ten years or even more, AIDS is not a boom-and-bust infection like the Black Death. Unchecked it could move on a time-scale of 200 rather than 20 years. But the effects could be as devastating. It is thus...
