Tourism, Development and the Environment - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 256

(1834-1919) who coined the term 'ecology'. It was Haeckel who proposed
the notion of organic holism, regarding ecosystems as not only comprising
many elements - mankind being but one - but also as having intrinsic moral
value of their own (Chase, 1995). However, also interwoven with the emer-
gence of the perceived environmental crisis was the resurrection of the
Malthusian school of thought founded upon notions of impending social,
economic and environmental doom. Such ideas had lay somewhat dormant
during the prosperous postwar era of modernisation and the optimism it
instilled in the West but the dawn of neo-Malthusianism permeated a wide
spectrum of social and environmental literature.
Concerns about the rapidly rising global population started to emerge
during the 1950s, the issue receiving attention from, amongst others, Stamp
(1953) and Russell (1953), the latter contributing to the influential Man's
Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Thomas, 1955). The new generation
neo-Malthusians of the late 1960s and 1970s firmly placed the 'population
problem' at the heart of environmentalism. Paul Ehrlich's (1968) The Popu-
lation Bomb became a standard core text on countless geography course bib-
liographies, re-establishing Malthus' ideas of human population limits,
maintained by 'natural checks', as the received wisdom in population/envi-
ronment discourse.
Since then, of course, many of these fears have proved to be unfounded.
Nevertheless, by the late 1960s the North's unbridled pursuit of economic
growth was certainly leaving its imprint upon the natural environment.
Ecological concerns over the break up of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker 2
attracted public interest whilst in the United States (US), Rachel Carson's
(1962) book Silent Spring raised awareness over intensification of agricultural
practices. The 1970s also witnessed the publication of several highly pessi-
mistic commentaries on the emerging environment and development debate.
For example, Forrester's (1971) World Dynamics was one of several attempts
to produce global models of a coupled economic and ecological system. The
most notable attempt to simulate the consequences of increasing industriali-
sation was that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on behalf of
the Club of Rome (an international group of academics backed by European
multinational companies). Their work, published as The Limits to Growth
(Meadows et al. , 1972) along with 'Blueprint for survival' (Goldsmith et al. ,
1972) became the most influential manifestations of 1970s environmental-
ism. The former, based upon what are today regarded as simplistic and naïve
computer simulations, won popular acclaim, although, in retrospect, both its
methodology and ideology have attracted considerable criticism. Simon
(1981), for example, dismissed The Limits to Growth as 'a fascinating example
of how scientific work can be outrageously bad and yet very influential'
(quoted in Adams, 1992: 29).
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the neo-Malthusian uprising of the 1970s
initiated a spate of equally emotive counter-arguments about the capacity