CHLOROPHYLL AND ENERGY 215 



the immense and swarming biosphere depends. This vast 

 pyramid of living things rests entirely on the energy produced 

 through chlorophyll, which enables life to spring into being 

 and sustains its impetus day by day. How subordinate seem 

 all those other forms of energy that industry values so highly! 



The Real Problem 



If we draw up a balance sheet of our actual and potential 

 resources and consider the future, we see that there is an 

 increasingly large margin of energy as we descend the scale 

 of importance and that the margin becomes proportionately 

 smaller as we approach the energy produced through chloro- 

 phyll. Here the possibihties of increase seem so precarious 

 that a limiting factor — "a constricting bottle-neck" — suddenly 

 rises before us. The future of humanity inescapably depends 

 on this energy. 



The first man who seemed to realize this was an EngUsh 

 clergyman, Thomas R. Malthus. In a book which caused a 

 sensation, he showed that the number of human beings tends 

 to increase much more rapidly than their means of sub- 

 sistence. It is possible for each couple to have an average of 

 four or five children; the human population would then be 

 doubled in each generation, while if the farmer succeeds in 

 producing from his field twice the crop that his father did, 

 his son, in turn, will have difficulty in doubling that again and 

 for his grandson the difficulty will be even greater. At the end 

 of a hundred years, a field, however well it is cultivated, cannot 

 produce sixteen times more food, while it is quite possible 

 for the population to be sixteen times larger. For farming, 

 the progression can, at the most, be arithmetic, but not 

 geometric Hke that of the population. "Nature," he concluded, 

 "has spread the germ of life with a Uberal hand, but she 

 has been sparing of space and elements." 



Original, and on the whole just, Malthus's views have domin- 

 ated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Anglo- 

 Saxon countries particularly seem to have been impressed by 

 them. Neo-Malthusian propaganda is very active and we owe to it 



