Population and Resources: Fact and Interpretation

Abstract

THE INTERRELATION BETWEEN POPULATION AND RESOURCES is a difficult subject. For this there seem to be several reasons. First, the two interacting sets of phenomena (resources and population) come from different universes of discourse. To bring them together in a common frame of reference is not like comparing apples and oranges, which at least are both fruit, but more like comparing, say, houses and trees, or horses and bacteria. The category itself includes a huge and diverse miscellany of things having little in common. Copper and fresh water, for example, have nothing in common except that both are used by man. Further confusion arises from the fact that mankind's use of resources is not just a phenomenon to be observed and understood scientifically, but a matter of major political and economic significance and therefore of controversy and popular opinion (Teitelbaum and Winter, 1985). Further, no one specializes in the study of population and resources as an integrated discipline. One is either a demographer or a natural scientist, but not both at once. Demographers are baffled by the encyclopedic knowledge they think the natural scientist must possess, and the environmental specialist often has only a sketchy view of human demography. Demography itself is a peculiar subject. It has developed analytic tools that can be applied to nonhuman as well as to human entities-for instance, to telephone poles, rabbits, machines, and cells. Scholars in the social sciences, however, are not used to dealing with human beings in abstraction from ideas, motives, and, in general, subjective aspects of behavior. As a result, the demographer is often regarded in social science circles as a mere provider of statistical facts, while the economist, sociologist, and social psychologist provide the interpretation. It frequently turns out, however, that the best person to interpret the facts is the scholar who produced them in the first place. On the environmental side, the wide array of disciplines that must somehow be drawn upon is intimidating. Since no one individual could