Twentieth-Century Trends

Each of the world wars has been examined intensively from highly specialized social, economic and political viewpoints, but the immediate environmental effects—like the infinitely more elusive impacts on environmental ideas and attitudes—have been relatively neglected. Other major events and trends of the first half of the twentieth century are chronologically less discrete and their environmental history is generally better understood, yet in terms of their penetrating international influences they should be set alongside the great cataclysms. I refer to the stunning population migrations, facilitated by improvements in communication and mass transportation systems and by the very competitions between the expansionist powers which visited such brutalities on the Old World. The associated image of a ‘shrinking globe’ may be traced to much earlier times, but there is no doubt that it provided the West with a common focus of debate during the period 1900-45. Writing E-Marketing Essay Help is difficult. Buy trusted help with your college essays! The engrossing elaborations on the latter theme obliged discussants to explore the Malthusian legacy and they did so at the international, regional and local levels. In this regard one heavily subscribed topic centred on the earth’s capacity to accommodate its increasing numbers of human inhabitants, usually entailing subsidiary disputations over ambitious contemporary designs for population redistribution and the differential values to be attached to reputedly ‘underdeveloped’ countries. The contributions made towards these debates by its leading specialist practitioners broadly enhanced geography’s status as an emerging academic subject, and the best work of a number of innovative geographers drew attention to the environmental limitations on exponential growth and warned against super-confident population estimates. One of the most celebrated of these early crusaders was an Australian, Griffith Taylor. He offered a prediction of 19-20 million in 2001 for his own country when the forecasts of nationalist-imperialist optimists and opportunists were wild multiples of that total. Taylor’s prediction was backed by a straightforward environmental survey which is not too badly described as a precursor of today’s arguments for ‘ecological sustainability’.