Foreword
For centuries, population growth was believed to be beneficial, mostly for economic reasons. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the tide of popular opinion turned, as plummeting death rates and persistently high fertility rates — especially in the poorest parts of the world — aroused concerns about a population "explosion." But in the late twentieth century, when contraception became widely used in economically advanced countries, many began to think that such fears were exaggerated. Now, alarms are again being raised about what will happen when the number of people on the planet outweighs its capacity to sustain them. Today, the…
