The world household : Georg Borgström and the postwar population-resource crisis

Sammanfattning: This dissertation deals with how the agenda of environmental issues was set in the early postwar years. Natural resources were placed high on the agenda of international politics, the scientific community and the media. At the crux was a concern that overpopulation placed so vast demands on the world's resources that it might jeopardize the new world order, maybe the entire civilization. The agenda of the postwar conservation debates was to a large extent formed by the transformation of western political economy and the geopolitical interests of the United States and its allies. This process induced a reorientation for traditional conservation. A new global view of humankind's relationship to nature emerged, which formed an ideological foundation for postwar environmental criticism.In this study the influential but controversial Swedish-American food scientist Georg Borgström is studied as conveyer of a new conservation ideology, that was formed in the early postwar years. With warnings of ecological disasters, he stirred up debates on population growth and dwindling natural resources. Borgström, who is generally regarded as one of the precursors of the Scandinavian environmental debate, became a renowned intermediary between American and European conservationism. By taking on a more active role communicating by media to politicians and the public, and by promoting a synthesizing and practically oriented interdisciplinary research, Borgström heralded a new type of scientist.Through the works of Borgström, political, scientific and conservationist debates on population growth and resource shortages are depicted from the end of World War II to 1972.