Calvin Beisner, Cornwall Alliance: For 218 years—since Thomas Robert Malthus published the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population—people have been coming up with new rationales for limiting or even reducing human population. Julian Simon, in The Ultimate Resource and I in Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future, provided both theoretical and empirical evidence that such fears were baseless. If people are fundamentally consumers and polluters, as extreme environmentalists picture them, it may make sense to try to reduce population size. If they are instead made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26) to be creative and productive, then His instruction for them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over” everything in it makes better sense.
