Freedom From What? Environment and Population in W. Vogt and H.F. Osborn

Abstract

This essay considers the environmental and political discourse of prominent American scientists William Vogt and Henry Fairfield Osborn, concerning their best-sellers Road to Survival (1948) and Our Plundered Planet (1948). It is argued that by re-articulating the place of ‘population’ in environmental thinking, they both advanced a specific theory of limits and possibilities of individual freedom. Their public position in the most pressing debates of the time resulted in a critique of modernization and development and a specific understanding of planning as a tool to ‘write’ a different ‘history of the future’ of Western civilization.