Unit information: The Malthus Wars: Debating Population, Resources and the Environment in 2018/19

Unit name	The Malthus Wars: Debating Population, Resources and the Environment
Unit code	GEOG30019
Credit points	20
Level of study	H/6
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Professor. Mayhew
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	GEOG25110 Philosophy, Social Theory and Geography
Co-requisites	None
School/department	School of Geographical Sciences
Faculty	Faculty of Science

Description including Unit Aims

Is population the “ultimate resource” allowing human societies to expand and flourish or a “bomb” whose detonation will destroy civilization and the environment in which it lives? This question, far from being the preserve of the 1960s or of present day anxieties about climate change, in fact has a pedigree stretching back a quarter of a millennium. The aim of this unit is to introduce students to debates about how population, resources and the environment interact over the long run. In particular students will learn:

1. To understand how the debate about population, resources and the environment was framed for modern, industrialising societies in the Enlightenment and why
2. To trace the patterns these debates have taken via literature, Darwinian evolution, concerns over eugenics and social engineering down to the peak of neo-Malthusian fears in the three decades after World War 2

To see the echoes between present demographic debates and those built over the past two centuries.

Intended Learning Outcomes

By the end of the unit, students will be able to:

1) understand debates about population, resources and the environment in historical context

2) write using primary source material about how European and North American scholars framed the population-resource question

3) situate contemporary debates about population’s environmental impact in a longer run trajectory

Teaching Information

9 x 1 hour lectures.

4 x 2 hour study skills sessions.

3 student led presentation sessions ( 1 x 2 hour and 2 x 1 hour).

Weekly open hour slots to support the student led reading sessions and address other queries.

Assessment Information

1) A “mid term” essay approximately halfway through the course about Malthus’s argument in the 1798 Essay to build textual analysis skills – 2000 words (40%)

2) A longer end of unit essay triangulating Malthus’s ideas with those of selected interlocutors addressed in the second half of the course. 3000 words (60%)

Reading and References

Essential

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population and Selected Other Writings (Penguin Classics: London, 2015)

Robert Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Ma., 2014)

Recommended

Piers Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2014)

Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth (Columbia University Press: New York, 2014)

Robert Mayhew (ed) New Perspectives on Malthus (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2016)

Tom Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 2012)