Globalization is essential to sustainability
Retrenching to nationalism would be bad for the environment and humanity
We are in a bit of a Malthusian race, one which I am pretty sure we are going to ‘win’, albeit with a lot of collateral damage. And with a really lovely byproduct of global peace. That race is between the negative externalities and positive externalities of globalization, with its huge flows of trade between countries in the world.
For those who don’t remember Thomas Robert Malthus, he was a dour cleric and economist who in 1798 predicted that the human race’s population explosion would outstrip our ability to grow food, and that as a result we would likely suffer a series of expansions to unsustainable levels, followed by catastrophic collapses back to lower levels of population. Rinse and repeat. As I said, dour. Also, completely ignorant of the power of human innovation it seems, as despite living in the middle of the Industrial Revolution which was automating quite enormous numbers of tasks and innovating on multiple fronts, he seemed to think that this couldn’t happen with agriculture.
