Aldous Huxley On Overpopulation
The author Aldous Huxley was one of the more notable science fiction authors of the twentieth century. He is most famous for his sci-fi novel Brave New World, along with several other published works.
Aldous Huxley was also a frequent columnist. In a 1950 article published in Redbook, he detailed his thoughts on human overpopulation in the year 2000.
He wrote as follows:
“During the next fifty years mankind will face three great problems: the problem of avoiding war; the problem of feeding and clothing a population of two and a quarter billion which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three billion, and the problem of supplying these billions without ruining the planet’s irreplaceable resources.
“Let us assume – and unhappily it is a large assumption – that the nations can agree to live in peace.
“In this event mankind will be free to devote all its energy and skill to the solution of its other major problems.”
Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, depicts a dystopian future in which populations are controlled and placated thorough intellectual censorship, deliberate conditioning, and omnipresent access to hedonistic pleasures.
In 1958 he went on to publish Brave New World Revisited, a work of non-fiction in which he reflected on his earlier novel, comparing its predictions for the future with the actual world. In it he describes just how bleak he saw the problem of rapid population growth and the strain it was placing on natural resources.
Huxley wrote:
“At the rate of increase prevailing between the birth of Christ and the death of Queen Elizabeth I, it took sixteen centuries for the population of the earth to double. At the present rate it will double in less than half a century.
“And this fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be taking place on a planet whose most desirable and productive areas are already densely populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic efforts of bad farmers to raise more food, and whose easily available mineral capital is being squandered with the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor getting rid of his accumulated pay.”
Brave New World depicts a population rigidly controlled, with people bred, as required, in factories. In a nod to Thomas Malthus, Huxley described in the story how women carry around contraceptives in a belt, called a Malthusian Belt.
Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World at a time when the world’s population was less than 2.5 billion. What would he have made of a population of 8 billion plus?
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