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The Overpopulation Debate

2010 was the year good old-fashioned, blame-it-on-the-breeding-masses overpopulation theory re-entered the mainstream. There’s just too many Malthusians, says Tim Black.
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In 2008, we had the hyper-intelligent, hyper-unreadable Stephen Hawking telling us there would literally be no room on the planet by 2600. And then of course, in April 2009, Sir David Attenborough came out as an adversary of procreation and promptly joined the Optimum Population Trust. “I’ve never seen a problem”, he announced, “that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more”. But such public statements were just a foretaste of what was to come in 2010.

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