Picture an empty bottle.
At eleven o'clock in the morning…
…drop in a single bacterium.
It divides once a minute. One becomes two.
Two become four. Four become eight.
Fifty-five minutes on, the bottle is three percent full.
Ninety-seven percent open space — just yearning for development.
If you were an average bacterium, when would you realize you were running out of space?
11:57 — twelve percent. And still doubling, every minute.
11:58 — a quarter full.
11:59 — half full. One minute to go.
Noon. The bottle is full.
12:01 — it spills over the rim.
And that's the end of the line.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
— Albert Bartlett, 1972For over half a century, Al Bartlett's bacteria-in-a-bottle thought experiment influenced a movement of scientists and environmental activists worried about overpopulation.
When Bartlett died in 2013, he was eulogized in white nationalist journals for his advocacy to end immigration into the United States.
This is the story of how quantitative tools and arguments about conservation repeatedly become tools of exclusion and dominance.