Introducing the Fountain Road Files, a new horror fiction podcast from unexplained creator Richard McLean Smith.

In March 2020, 27-year-old Cafe worker Ben Williams began recording an audio diary of the coronavirus pandemic.

Two months later, he was found dead in the South London flat where he was spending lockdown alone.

Also, he thought.

Search the Fountain Road Files wherever you get your podcasts and for more information, go to thefountainroadfiles.com.

In his famed and controversial 1798 paper, an essay on the principle of population,

the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus outlined the theory for which he has since been immortalised.

Malthusianism, as it came to be known, broadly speaking, is the belief that the global human population

will increase inevitably to the point where it can no longer be sustained by the resources available to it,

unless it is curbed by either natural disasters or state intervention.

Without such checks, Malthus believed many would be fated to a lifetime of financial poverty and destitution,

as more and more people would be forced to scrap over ever diminishing proportions of food.

Malthus' theory was undermined emphatically in the next 100 years by the sheer human capacity for ingenuity and its repatious thirst for commodities.

Throughout the 19th century, although global population continued to increase at a rapid rate,

it was more than compensated for by the equally rapid technological advances of the industrial revolution.

With new tools such as the Threshing Machine came the ability to farm far more intensively than ever before,

but just as crucial was the introduction to Europe and the United States of an extremely unlikely nitrogen rich fertilizer.

It was back in 1802 that the brilliant Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt first came across it while trekking through Peru,

called Wano by those local to the region, otherwise known as Guano.

This natural fertilizer comprised of bat and bird excrement had long been considered an extraordinarily effective fertilizer used even by the ancient Incas.

Humboldt's introduction to Guano set in motion a chain of events that would not only change the world as we knew it,

but change it in ways that we may struggle to ever recover from.

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