Green growth or degrowth, the debate continues as the climate clock is ticking on

July 24 was Earth Overshoot Day (EOD) for 2025. By this date, the humanity had consumed a year's worth of ecological resource regeneration by the Earth.

- SATISH KUMAR SHARMA

Now we are living on environmental overdraft. For 2015, the EOD was August 15, and each year we are sliding. So, theoretically, in a future year, EOD may come even in January. But actually, that is unlikely because a Malthusian or ecological disaster is sure to make corrections, forcing us to make painful adjustments.

Thomas Malthus was not a crystal ball gazer like Nostradamus. The 18th Century cleric-economist was among the first of his tribe to use empirical methods to arrive at his theory on population growth. His data was not accurate, but we have to grant that it was late 18th century. His theory, put succinctly, says that while food grain production grows arithmetically, population grows geometrically. So, if population goes on rising unchecked, it would lead to famines, epidemics, or wars, to avert which he advised abstinence.

In the hindsight, Malthus seems to have been centuries ahead of his time, but in his days, he was hopelessly out of sync with the prevailing reality. For his thesis came when the British Agricultural Revolution was peaking and the farm output was growing faster than population. Also, the wheels of industrial revolution had started rolling. In that atmosphere of optimism, Malthus was derided as a prophet of doom and Economics as 'dismal science'.