Nostalgia for Former Causes

I stumbled upon some statistics yesterday that I haven't noticed in a while. The world's population has been ballooning at an amazing rate. Population first hit 1 billion people in 1804, and it took less than 125 years to double that, getting to 2 billion in 1927. A scant 33 years later in 1960, we hit 3 billion, and then 4 billion came in 1974. The next milestone was 1987 for 5 billion, and 6 billion followed in 1999.

The population explosion was a common catchphrase in the '70s. It hasn't faded away completely, but for some reason the issue doesn't seem to have the immediacy it once did. The fear in this issue, of course, and it continues to make sense today, is that population will grow so much as to outstrip the planet's natural resources. One basic precept is Thomas Malthus's principle that population would increase geometrically, by multiplication, and resource would increase only arithmetically, by addition. I first heard of Malthus when I was on the debate team in high school, when we repeated the geometric/arithmetic equation religiously. I might've heard of him a few years earlier, if I'd bought this comic book.


I remember looking through this comic on the stands when it was new in 1970, but my comic buying was far more constrained in those days (even with comic books at 15 cents, a ten-year-old back in the day had to be very choosy). Almost a year earlier, Green Lantern had teamed up with newly ultra-liberal Green Arrow to go in search of America. Sales were down, and the creative team, writer Denny O'Neil, artist Neal Adams, and editor Julius Schwartz, decided to take a new tack with the series, exploring current issues of the day. (As you can see, it's All New and All Now.) This issue, obviously, took on the population explosion and featured our heroes traveling to the planet Maltus (yes, they dropped the h) which had its own population crisis (I didn't buy it at the time, but I've since read the story). After I heard those statistics and traveled down this consciousness stream to this comic book, it occurred to me that this issue of Green Lantern came out 3 billion people ago. Why isn't overpopulation as pressing and imperative an issue today as it seemed to be then?