Physicist Dr. Albert Bartlett believes that man’s greatest
shortcoming may be his inability to understand the exponential function. A long time member of the faculty at the
University of Colorado at Boulder (since 1950), Bartlett has given his famous
lecture, “Arithmetic, Population, and Energy,” 1,600 times over the past fifty
years. Add to that millions of hits on
YouTube, and it may be the most viewed lecture of all time.
Dr. Bartlett, now nearing ninety years old, is still eager
to inform others about the least discussed major issue that mankind faces:
overpopulation. While politicians move
their mouths on topics from unemployment to global warming, not since Nixon has
a leading politician uttered the word overpopulation. Telling society that we are our own worst
problem is not a popular thing to do; it is, on the other hand, a very
responsible thing to do. Overpopulation exacerbates
both global warming as well as unemployment, not to mention poverty, at the
local and global level.
