Figure 1. Deevey’s graph of the rise of global population first appeared in a 1960 article in Scientific American. According to his analysis, human numbers rose notably at three times in the past, corresponding to the advent of toolmaking, of agriculture and of industry, but this appearance is an artifact of the graph. The extent to which human beings affect the environment depends, in large measure, on the number of people in the world. Despite the paramount significance of this statistic, many students, environmental analysts and even policymakers have a distorted understanding of the history of population growth. The confusion stems from a single misleading graph that often appears in … Continue reading Peter Schulze, Jack Mealy