I am not a conspiracy theorist, but…

Clearly, that is how every conspiracy theorist begins his or her sentences. However, reading the last pages of The Three-Body Problem, all my years of fighting Malthusians were suddenly given a plausible explanation ;-) In the book, extraterrestrials, known as “Trisolarans”, realize that, given how fast humanity is currently evolving in terms of technology, they will not be able to take over our planet by the time they get here in four hundred years. As such they devise a strategy:

“Given a time gap of [four hundred years], the strategic value of any traditional tactics of war or terror is insignificant, and they can recover from them. To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way to: kill its science”.

“The plan focuses on emphasizing the negative environmental effects of scientific development […] in addition to highlighting the negative effects of progress”.

Recruiting the most misanthropic of environmentalists and playing on humanity’s existential desire for a final judgement, the Trisolarans successfully create a fifth column of humans who, I guess, are the ones I keep fighting with in my academic articles... Comforting as this explanation would be, I am afraid that the real explanation is much less exciting. Instead of an alien mastermind, I think most Malthusians simply fail to see the bigger picture, and that they let moral indignation over how humanity is treating nature in the present (an indignation that I share btw) cloud their thinking about the future.