Population, Environment, and Ingenuity

I'm going to talk about some of the social consequences of population growth and the natural resource scarcities that sometimes arise from that growth. Most importantly, I'm going to talk about how societies respond to these stresses-demographic stresses and natural resource stresses-and whether they can respond well or not so well. The previous presentations have set mine up very nicely; you'll see some resonance between those points and what I have to say. I am going to focus on the role of ideas, or what I call ingenuity, in the social adaptation processes that some societies carry out in response to severe population and ecological stresses. I will build a simple theory of social adaptation that is keyed to three…