This break was accompanied by the growth of world population from 800 million in 1750 to over 1.5 billion in 1900, 2.5 billion in 1950, 3 billion fifty years ago and over 7 billion today.
It was precisely the postwar exponential demographic acceleration – the “population explosion” – that prompted discussion on the “limits to growth.” At the start of the 1970s the Report of the “Club of Rome,” 3 which centred on the predicted depletion of natural resources, raised alarm about the survival of the Earth’s ecosystem and of the human species itself.