Two hundred years ago Thomas Malthus suggested the existence of limits in food production. A population that was too large would cause a subsequent decrease as a result of famines, plagues, and war. Neo-Malthusians posit that other factors might limit population, such as environmental contamination and resources exhaustion, but have until now assumed a rigid relation between such factors and population. Both Malthusians and Neo-Malthusians are catastrophists, claiming that either the continuation of the present trends of population growth or of population and resources and environmental contamination inevitably leads to disaster. Malthus received a great deal of criticism. Technological advances and the opening of new land to cultivation would overcome a problem of food supply. Revolutionary theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were among the most vocal critics of Malthus. Karl Kautsky, also a Socialist leader, expressed a milder view, admitting that Malthus might be right in the long run, but his point of view went practically unnoticed.iThere were few anticapitalist supporters of Malthus. However, William Vogt, a critic of capitalism who published a Malthusian tract (Road to Survival) in 1948, proved one exception.2 More than a century later, the Neo-Malthusian perspective revived. Limits to Growth can be considered the most importantwork of Neo-Malthusian literature.3 It contains the results of a global model developed by a group of MIT researchers led by Jay Forrester, a pioneer in systems research, and including Dennis and Donella Meadows and several others. FM, as this group is often called, had a large impact on creating a worldwide environmental consciousness. Widely criticized in the United States, Britain, and West Germany, by ideologists from the socalled really existing Socialism, (which we should better call bureaucratic collecfivism, and by Latin American Populists), and by Latin American Populists, Limits to Growth seemed bereft of political allies. Even some left-wing environmentalists, such as David