Jon,

Reading music...Fuel by Lars Ulrich and the boys

My riposte to the argument advanced by the good Reverend Malthus is that the human animal occupies a very small portion of the 510 million square kilometers, or so, of the Earth and our time as a species has been astonishingly brief as compared to the estimated 4.5 billion years or so our world has been around. As a result, there is much that we as a species do not know of and this further is compounded by the fact that we truly understand very little of what we claim to 'know'.

The cell cycle, or growth patterns (lag, exponential growth, stationary, and endogenous phases), F/M Ratios, the S-Curve, ecological succession, etc are all concepts to think about when describing natural systems but I would also advocate reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Consider balancing the concepts of human/economic specialization and market segmentation against the mind boogling biological specialization present in our world as partially described in the epic Bergy's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology...then head on over to descriptions of the other biological kingdoms and take a look at the diversity and specialization on display with respect to the utilization of resources.

'Brief' local shortages, surely, 'sustained' system-wide shortages, surely not...humans are way too adaptable...when we ran out of caves, we built....

Ask yourself, who is it that definitively knows where the brain-pan currently resides that will help our species to leap today's perceived hurdles? Perhaps that answer should guide our actions in the world...