“Every argument, every concept, every recommendation” in Vogt’s book, notes the historian Allan Chase, became “integral to the conventional wisdom of the post-Hiroshima generation of educated Americans.” The Reader’s Digest, a publication with sales second only to the Bible, reprinted a condensed version of Vogt’s book. Between 1956 and 1973, seventeen out of twenty-eight general biology textbooks included a version of Leopold’s account of the collapse of the deer in Kaibab.
Malthus’s predictions never made sense to me and never panned out. They were poorly analyzed and insufficiently discussed in the 69s and 70s.
