The Age of Overbreed

Unless he chooses to mend his reproductive ways, man is heading for the greatest disaster in his history. Why is it that we---the human species---have not yet become fully alive to this frightening fact? Partly because of the common human tendency to put off facing disagreeable facts until the last possible moment; but largely because people have not learned to think in terms of human processes and trends rather than of material mechanisms and systems. They have not learned to think of man as both a product of and an agent in the over-all process of evolution; and in particular they have not bothered to think quantitatively about this basic process of population growth, and have failed to realize how it is threatening to change the entire quality of human existence for the worse. It is exerting disastrous pressure on all our resources and eroding the bases of civilized existence.

It is becoming clear that if we do not act soon, man will become the cancer of the planet, destroying its resources and eventually his own future self.

Let me begin with a few figures. World population is now nearly three and a quarter billion, and is multiplying at a compound interest rate of about one and three-quarters percent a year; which is producing an increase of over 60,000,000 in the present year---the equivalent of the whole population of the U. S. in three years. When I last wrote about population two years ago, the annual increase was estimated at about 55,000,000; the rise since then is partly automatic---an increasing population will give a bigger increase each year---but it is partly due to faulty estimation. As census figures improve, earlier estimates of increase have always proved too low.

This means a daily increase of 160,000---the equivalent of one of our British New Towns every day through the year; and of over 110 every minute, the equivalent of 11 baseball teams complete with manager. (And yet there are people so quantitatively illiterate that they talk of shipping our surplus population to other planets!)

Next year the absolute net increase will of course be greater, even if the rate of increase stays the same; but actually the rate is increasing, too---in other words, population-increase is accelerating. For most of man's history the compound interest rate must have been below one-tenth of one percent per annum. It reached one percent only in the early years of this century, is now about one and three-quarters percent and is almost certainly still going up.

It took the human species, Homo sapiens, at least 100,000 years to reach two thirds of a billion. This was in 1650---the first period for which we have even approximately good figures. From this date, it took nearly 200 years for world population to double itself once, but the second doubling took only 100 years. It has more than doubled itself again in the 64 years of the present century and will certainly double itself still again within the next 40 years.

Barring accidents like a nuclear war, what about the future? By the year 1999 (which I choose rather than 2000 for the same reason that shopkeepers price an article at $1.98 rather than $2) world population will certainly have reached six billion, and may well be nearer seven billion. If the present rate of increase still continues, by 2050 A.D. world population will be around twenty billion, and by 2500 A.D. (and half a millennium is a very short time in the perspective of evolution) there will be only one square yard of dry land for every human being.

Which, of course, as Euclid would say, is absurd. No population, human or animal, can continue to multiply geometrically, by compound interest, because this involves unlimited increase, and the environment and its resources are limited. This is true even if the rate of increase is very low, as Darwin pointed out for elephants. But during the last hundred years, our rate of increase has become very high---high enough to cause what has properly been called the Population Explosion.

Ironically enough, this sinister and threatening phenomenon has been caused by the beneficent and praiseworthy activities of medical science and public health in preserving life. It is the result of death-control. Mortality has gone down, especially infant mortality, which not so long ago in many countries accounted for the deaths of a third or even a half of all babies born, before they had reached the age of one. The expectation of life of a Roman citizen even at the height of the Empire was only 30 years; in tropical countries less than a century ago, it was often only 20. Today it is rising everywhere, and in some Western countries is over 70.

Everyone will agree that in itself death-control is desirable and good. It is good that babies should not die in infancy; it is good that men and women should enjoy longer life. But death-control can itself get out of control, and then its results are undesirable. Death-control has posed us with the disastrous problem of overpopulation. To this, there is only one desirable answer---birth-control: the balancing of birth-rate against death-rate. There is, however, an alternative but undesirable answer which I may call death decontrol: reversion to nature's crude methods of balancing birth and death through famine, disease and killing.

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The world situation is grave enough. It becomes much graver when we look at the two half-worlds separately---the developed and the underdeveloped countries, the rich and the poor peoples, the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots---India and Pakistan, the West Indies, Southeast Asia, most countries of Africa, Latin America and the Middle East---are multiplying much faster than the world average, and very much faster than the haves. Their rate of population growth ranges upward from 2 percent a year to 3 and 3 1/2 and 4, and in one case---Costa Rica---astonishingly to 4.4 percent, a rate which means a quadrupling of population within a single generation! Costa Rica is at the moment the most prosperous of the Central American countries: it will assuredly not remain so very long.

In the have-nots, too, the population explosion is very recent (India's numbers remained nearly constant for most of our era) and is due to death-control. To take a single example: The excellent antimalarial campaign in Ceylon halved the death-rate within a decade. As a result, Ceylon's annual increase rate is now over three percent, which means doubling in under 20 years.

I spoke of the danger of man becoming the cancer of his own planet. Some of the overmultiplying have-not areas which are politically part of a developed country, are already showing a cancerous phenomenon---they are forming metastases: there is a metastasis of Costa Ricans in Harlem, of West Indian Negroes in parts of Britain.

The gap between haves and have-nots is shockingly wide. Take India as an example: 60 percent of Indians (which amounts to a great many people) "enjoy" an income of under 50 cents a day, and 30 percent only 30 cents. The disparity between the U.S. and India is about 2 to 1 in regard to mere calories and to expectation of life, from 20 to 25 to 1 in steel and available energy, and I suppose at least 100 to 1 in regard to newsprint. These disparities become still more shocking when one considers how much is wasted in the U. S. No one can eat the enormous portions of meat provided by American restaurants; and every Sunday issue of The New York Times (as I have checked for myself) contains more words than the whole Bible.

What is more, the gap is widening instead of shrinking. In spite of all our aid and assistance, (continued on page 106)Age of overbreed(continued from page 104) technical and otherwise, the rich nations are growing richer, the poor becoming poorer: and they are becoming poorer largely because their population is in creasing too fast.

The population explosion is also standing in the way of the economic development of the have-not countries. To industrialize a poor and already densely populated country like India, you need large amounts of capital and also of human skills. There are roads and railways and dams to be built, plants to be set up, machines to be made. If too many babies are born, too much of that capital and those skills will be taken up in feeding, clothing, housing and educating them, and economic development will be slowed or even stopped, while the total number of people to be looked after increases. The American economists Coale and Hoover go so far as to prophesy that if the Indian birth-rate is not halved within at most the next half-century. Indian development may reach a point of no return, and viable economic development will be impossible. The same holds for scores of other countries.

This implies our taking a quite new look at all the activities summed up under the heads of Aid and Technical Assistance, whether international, bilateral or privately sponsored. If, as can well happen with medical or agricultural aid, the result is to produce further population-increase, it is not really aiding the country at all, but actually hindering its advance.

So much for world population-increase: now for some of its effects.

The population explosion is pressing, and pressing hard, on our resources---resources of all kinds, material and non-material, renewable and non-renewable. It is a long list: food and water and space: minerals, fossil fuels and pure air; forests, fisheries and soil; natural beauty, wildlife and wilderness: enjoyment: the satisfactions and even the decencies of city life; even personal freedom, mental and spiritual health, and political stability. And its pressure is not the pressure of an inert weight which can simply be thrown off, but of a living trend of increasing force.

Let me enumerate. First, obviously, pressure on food: Man must eat to live. Let us first recall that about two thirds of the world's present population are undernourished, hungry or malnourished, not getting enough calories, proteins or vitamins for normal growth, health and strength. That is two billion people. The number will go up each year for decades to come, for increase of food-production is only just about keeping pace with the total increase in mouths to be fed. Merely to make up for the self-multiplying two-billion backlog of undernourished human beings, a large increase will be necessary, and this will mean changing systems of land use, of family life, of old attitudes and antiquated methods. Meanwhile, in underdeveloped countries, the pressure is so great that large areas of ever more marginal land are being brought under cultivation of a sort, so leading to deterioration of their productivity, to erosion, besides preventing them from being used for recreation or wildlife conservation.

In the long run, too, the situation is grave. People talk glibly about producing food on the huge areas covered by equatorial rain-forest: but once the appalling labor of clearance has been undertaken, the forest soils turn out to be useless for permanent crop raising. The Arctic can yield little without vast capital expenditure. The center of Australia is covered with a laterite crust, its ground water is largely saline: and even if it could all be cultivated, and if it were thrown open to nonwhites, it could absorb only about two years' surplus from China alone!

Such contentions emphasize the falsity and stupidity of the common view of the situation as a race---between people and food, between reproduction and production. A race is something that can be won by going faster than someone or something else. This can never happen with food and people. Of course, with great expenditure of capital, skill and labor we could irrigate the world's deserts and could produce nutriment from leaves and yeasts and algae (though the result might not be very palatable), but meanwhile population will still be snowballing at compound interest: within a couple of centuries it will inevitably have overtaken food-production, and this means losing the race instead of winning it.

The key idea is not a race but a balance---we can't win the race with hunger, but we can---or could, with the combination of birth control and applied science---achieve a workable balance of population with food, and equally with other resources.

After food, water. Of course, water is the limiting factor in arid lands. But we so-called civilized nations are so used to thinking of water as inexhaustible that it is a shock to find populations pressing on water supplies even in our own temperate countries. In England, the southeast is menaced by water shortage within a few years: northern conurbations like Manchester are in bitter dispute with the National Parks over their proposal to take more water from the English lakes; evaporation from industrial cooling towers is reducing the flow of rivers like the Trent. California is still proud of its growth, which has now given it the esteemed title (esteemed by current American standards) of the most populous state in the Union. But this very growth, not content with removing thousands of acres annually from cultivation to habitation, is bringing acute water problems. Southern California is having to bring water from 850 miles away; and there is friction over water with neighboring states (a science-fiction writer might write an exciting book on California's future water-rights war!)

Not content with over-using and wasting our water, we blithely pollute it. The total solid matter, including sewage, that is discharged each year into the water of the world comes to about 64 cubic miles---enough to make a mountain with 20,000-foot vertical sides and a flat top of 16 square miles.

Because of sewage, many Swiss lakes and some European seaside resorts are no longer safe (or pleasant) for bathing; and I believe Lake George to be the only lake in New York State whose waters are fit to drink. Truly, our aflluent society is in danger of turning into an effluent society.

Doubtless we shall eventually desalinate sea water to supply Los Angeles and irrigate the Sahara, and shall find sensible ways of disposing of sewage, detergents, atomic waste and other effluents and polluents. But it will be enormously expensive, and meanwhile, things are very unpleasant.

I must also mention the pollution of our fields, woods and waters with pesticides and herbicides, which are killing off our songbirds and falcons, our butterflies and wild flowers ("half the basis of English poetry," as my brother Aldous once said).

Owing to the multiplication of automobiles and the growth of heavy industry resulting from population-increase, the CO2 content of the air is steadily increasing, and its heat-blanketing effect is gradually raising the earth's mean temperature. If this process continues unchecked for a century or so, the polar icecaps will melt and the sea level will rise, and an enormous area of the world's coastal flatlands will be flooded, great cities like New York and New Orleans, London and Rotterdam will have to be abandoned, and their populations resettled in an already overcrowded hinterland.

Population is also inflicting increasing loads of litter on the landscape. Plastic litter is the worst, because it is so indestructible. Perhaps some ten million years hence, excavators will come on deposits of compressed plastic containing fossilized beer-cans and automobile parts, and will wonder how they were formed. Meanwhile the mess mounts, and so does the bill for clearing it up.

Population presses on space. This is most obvious in small, overcrowded (continued on page 177)Age of overbreed (continued from page 106) countries like England---agriculture, defense, atomic and hydroelectric power, roads, industry, recreation, housing, aerodromes and amenity all compete for the diminishing remnant of land surface available. Our green belts are being nibbled away, our countryside built over, our landscape dotted with pylons and cooling towers, filling stations and motels.

Recreation and wildlife, natural beauty and unspoiled coasts are especially pressed upon. Britain has a relatively long coastline; yet if every British man, woman and child were to go to the seaside on the same day, they would have little more than one yard of coastline apiece. The coasts of all Europe are being speedily filled up by the army of holidaymakers. Even in the U. S., with the world's finest National Park system, some of the parks are becoming "over-visited." The National Parks of eastern Africa, with their unique and splendid spectacle of great animals in freedom, seem safe for the moment: but land-hungry African populations are likely to double well before 2000 a.d. and when it becomes a question of land for Africans or for animals, however splendid and however profitable these parks may be as a source of tourist revenue, the Africans are likely to win.

Then there are the sites of modern pilgrimage---Venice, Oxford. Heidelberg, Florence, New York, Delphi and the rest. Already the abundance of sightseers is making it increasingly difficult to enjoy or even to see the sights. What such places will be like in 20 years if economic prosperity continues, one shudders to think. The only positive suggestion I have seen is to build duplicates, complete replicas of these cities; but clearly this will not be easy.

Pressure grows also on solitude. In the U.S. it is increasingly difficult to keep wilderness areas from being exploited commercially. For most countries the idea of wilderness as an asset has not dawned. But solitude is precious. Recently I saw a photograph of Jones Beach with a couple of hundred thousand people on it: in the foreground a young couple had made themselves a little solitude by digging a deep hole in the populous sand. And a not inconsiderable minority longs for periods of escape from the multitude into the solitude of the mountains or the deserts.

Population, coupled with reckless exploitation for immediate profit, is pressing hard on the world's material resources. The fossil fuels that took millions of years to accumulate are being exhausted in a few ticks of evolution's clock: oil cannot last more than a few more decades, coal more than a few centuries. As Professor Harrison Brown and others have abundantly documented, high-grade mineral ores are being used up, so we are having to resort to lower and lower grades, which means more labor and more expense. We may even have to undertake the still more elaborate and expensive business of transmuting more abundant elements into those we need.

We build bigger and better dams to provide hydroelectric energy. But dams inevitably silt up: We can visualize the world a few thousand years hence dotted with dam sites in every suitable location, but all full of silt instead of water. Eventually we shall have to rely more and more on atomic power and similar new sources of energy. But this, too, will be expensive. It will also be productive of unpleasant radiation risks, which in their turn will be difficult and costly to deal with: Think of the thousands upon thousands of lead containers full of atomic waste, accumulating in the deeps of the sea (and, by the way, where are we going to find enough lead?).

Population is pressing on the world's soils and forests. Forests are protectors of watersheds, preventers of floods, guardians against erosion. Yet since the dawn of history man has been treating them as enemies to be hacked down or sources of raw material to be burned or built with. Greece and Yugoslavia, Syria and Jordan, have been deforested and eroded, often to bare bones of rock, robbed of fertility. North Africa was one of the great granaries of Imperial Rome, and from its forests came the swarms of lions and wild boars, antelopes and elephants for the arena: now the forests are no more, save in patches on the high ground, the big animals have vanished, soil has been scoured away and productivity reduced. Wrong land use, like the overgrazing of brittle marginal lands with cattle, sheep and, finally, goats, has reduced huge tracts of once fertile land to semidesert. I have traveled through the once game-rich area south of Nairobi in Kenya: 12 years of overgrazing have converted it into wretched semidesert, and 12 years more will turn it into full desert.

Meanwhile, thousands of square miles of north temperate conifer forest are cut down every year, largely for newsprint, and not always replanted; The Araucaria forests of Chile are being converted into match-sticks, the Giant Redwoods of California are threatened, and the gorilla forests of the Kivu volcanoes are being eaten into by local cattle-herders.

Wrong cultivation also brings erosion. In the Tennessee Valley in 1934 I was shown a stretch of bare rock which some men still living remembered with five feet of good soil over it: that was when the Tennessee River ran clear blue instead of turbid yellow. Today, however, contour plowing has largely checked the erosion. Wrong cultivation produced the horrible Dust Bowl years, when the accumulated fertility of millennia was dissipated on the dust-laden winds.

We can repair much of the losses and forestall much future damage by reforestation and better methods of cultivation. But it will be costly and hard, and restoration will take a very long time; and meanwhile population-pressure is bringing more marginal land into wrong use, with deterioration the inevitable result.

Population is also pressing hard on city life---civilization in the original sense of the word. Increase in the total population of a country inevitably brings about an increase in the size and the number of big cities. But cities are growing just about twice as fast as population as a whole, so that their increase is disproportionate. It would be an illuminating exercise in geography to compare the number of cities with over a million people in 1900 and today. As regards maximum size, 200 years ago 1,000,-000 was near the limit; 50 years ago, 5,000,000; but now there are cities (in the modern sense of conurbations) of 10,000,-000---Tokyo, New York and London.

It is biologically impossible to have an efficient land animal of more than a certain size: Above elephant bulk, efficiency goes rapidly down toward zero. So, too, it seems humanly impossible to have a really efficient city of more than 4,000,-000 or 5,000,000 people: above that level, efficiency, it seems, begins to go down, and 10,000,000 must be close to the limit. Certainly the modern megalopolis is ceasing to function as a true city, a center of fully civilized life, and is inflicting ever more frustration on ever more of its inhabitants---more congestion, more noise, more commuting, less contact with nature, less civilized fulfillment. As Max Nicholson has well said, the megacity is reducing its inhabitants to minicitizens.

If the overlarge city is in an underdeveloped country, it will become a home of squalor and a hotbed of disease, like Calcutta today. If it is in a developed country it will cease to be a city and merge into a vast unorganized urban sprawl, as is already happening in southern California, and much of the United States' eastern seaboard. The only way for cities to become once again organs of civilization is for them to become smaller and more dispersed: and this can only happen if population-increase slows down. Meanwhile, vast sums will have to be spent in making overlarge cities humanly habitable.

Next, there is the pressure of population on jobs. Why has China recently re-embarked on a policy of birth-control, after proclaiming for years that strength and prosperity depend on numbers? We can be pretty sure that the main reason was the difficulty of finding 13,000,000 new jobs every year. In India, there is almost universal under-employment, with serious white-collar and proletarian unemployment. In places like Malta and the Caribbean islands the situation is even graver.

But the worst shock is coming from the combined pressure of population and automation. This is already obvious in the U.S., but will become apparent in other countries as automation inexorably invades them. The effect is first and foremost on the young. The general unemployment rate in the U.S. is high by European standards---over 5 percent; but for teenagers trying to enter the labor market it is about 15 percent, and for Negro teenagers 30 percent.

This is already a highly explosive situation, but will inevitably grow worse. As the authors of the Report on the Triple Revolution put it, there is increasing competition for jobs between men and machines, with the machines steadily winning. Without some pretty drastic changes in its social and economic system, the U.S. will be split into two nations, the employed minority with real jobs, nice incomes and a sense of significance, and the unemployed majority, scraping along on public assistance, jobless and unwanted. The alternative is for the machines to do most of what we now call work, while the men get on with the immense job of learning and teaching how to live more fully, helping human beings everywhere to find the right kinds of fulfillment.

Population is pressing very hard on education. At least two thirds of existing humanity are badly under-educated. Nearly half the world's population over 15 years of age---over 700,000,000---are illiterate, and the absolute number of illiterates is increasing by 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 a year. In most underdeveloped countries there is a passionate demand for education and a belief that it will somehow solve all their problems: But there is an appalling shortage of classrooms and furniture, books and teaching aids and, above all, of competent teachers, while the flood of babies is making things more difficult every year. The pressure is equally acute in the developed countries, though here mainly on higher education. In the U. S. the number of college entrants is destined to increase from 4.2 million to over 7 million by 1970---a 90 percent increase in 6 years. How is any country to cope with such a flood without lowering standards?

Population is pressing on man's psychological stability and satisfactions. Experimental studies have shown that overcrowding in animals produces acute stress syndromes. Their endocrine balance and their whole behavior system becomes deranged. They are more susceptible to infection and to arteriosclerosis, they become aggressive and their reproductive behavior becomes abnormal. Similar situations, such as concentration camps, produce similar effects in human beings; and there can be no reasonable doubt that much contemporary physical illness, neurosis, frustration and delinquency springs from the same basic fact of overcrowding in a restrictive environment.

Finally there are the political effects of population excess. Population is pressing on peace. Demands for lebens-raum can readily lead to war, as we know with pre-War Germany. China's population-pressure was surely at the base of her campaign in Tibet, and may well lead to other expansionist violence. In East Africa, it will be hard to prevent conflict between the rapidly multiplying agricultural land-hungry Kikuyu and the land-rich nomadic Masai.

Population is also pressing on freedom. As populations grow and technology advances, social life has to be more efficiently planned and regulated. But regulation can readily turn into regimentation, planning can become rigid and bureaucratic, and the whole social system can slide over into totalitarianism: and totalitarian nations are readier for military adventure.

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In general, then, the quantitative pressure of population, combined with that of mass-production, is exerting pressure on the quality and diversity of existence. Human expansion and economic exploitation are reducing the variety and beauty of our environment and its plant and animal inhabitants. Low-quality mass-produced objects are flooding the world's markets. Drab uniformity is threatening rich cultural diversity, both between and within nations. Egalitarian democracy, mass education and social pressures are imposing conformism and discouraging varied excellence. Evaluation in the quantitative terms of profitability and efficiency is pressing on originality and aesthetic quality. Machine-minding and automation are robbing industrial jobs of human interest and pride. Multiplicity of objects and outlets is dissipating man's spiritual and moral potential. The vast anonymous forces of quantity-minded industrial technology and bureaucratic administration are robbing human beings of their sense of personal significance, and reducing them to the merely quantitative status of units in a huge social machine.

This adds up to a very gloomy prospect. Whatever we do today, the world at the turn of the century will be a much more unpleasant and frustrating place to live in. But if we do nothing, the prospect for our grandchildren and indeed for the future of civilized human life, will be disastrous.

We must, of course, do our utmost to increase food-production, raise the standard of living, step up education, abolish waste, reduce frustration and prevent destructive violence. But all this, though necessary as a brake on man's disaster course, can do no more than alleviate symptoms. The only cure is birth-control, aimed in the first instance at bringing down the world's present unmanageable rate of increase to manageable proportions as fast as possible, and eventually at achieving a balance between population and resources.

And the obstacles in the way are tremendous---ignorance and refusal to face facts, long-established traditions, national, tribal and class jealousies, moral prejudice, ideological and religious dogma. (It is a grave scandal that the World Health Organization has twice been prevented by Roman Catholic pressure---aided, I regret to say by Anglo-Saxon apathy---from even considering population as a factor in world health.)

However, the prospect is not all gloom. Since 1914, the idea of population-control has gained increasing acceptance, and in the last few years has explosively broken through the crust of ignorance and prejudice to become a matter of high public importance.

Let me recall that half a century ago Margaret Sanger was jailed in New York for advocating birth-control: In 1959 in the same city she was publicly honored by an international banquet.

In the late Twenties, I myself was rebuked by the Director-General of the B.B.C., Sir John, now Lord, Reith, for having polluted the British ether by a demand for birth-control: Today the B.B.C., in common with many other radio and TV corporations, regularly stages talks and discussions on the subject.

In the U.S.A., birth-control has in the last five years shaken off the old taboos, and has become a topic of general discussion and official concern. It was abundantly discussed during the last Presidential election, and has been the subject of important official reports--- Senatorial, Presidential and scientific. The most important was the report prepared by the National Academy of Sciences which, after surveying the question from every angle, pressed strongly for much more research on human reproduction and its control, for making its results freely available, and for meeting the requests of other nations for help with their population problems.

Meanwhile, research is progressing, and has produced valuable (though not yet ideal or foolproof) new devices like the pill, or oral contraceptive, and the plastic coil. Male sterilization (without loss of normal sexual powers) is being used in India as a useful supplement to other methods of bringing down the birth-rate. And recent approaches by way of immunizing ova against fertilization, of causing failure of implantation, and of manipulating the endocrine system to prevent ovulation, are opening new hopes. But if only one tenth of one percent of the vast sums of money and disproportionate numbers of first-class brains allocated to nuclear research, weaponry and the race to the moon (miscalled space research) had been devoted to this central problem of human reproduction, we should undoubtedly have well and truly cracked it before now.

Another hopeful sign is the eroding of Roman Catholic intransigence on the subject. Catholic doctors like John Rock help in discovering the pill and write books on the urgency of the population explosion: high ecclesiastical dignitaries of the Church dispute publicly about the permissibility of "artificial" birth-control; younger lay Catholics disregard its prohibition, and speak of responsible parenthood in this world rather than unlimited production of souls to be saved in the next. A Catholic country like Chile adopts an official policy of population-control; and the Vatican, it seems, is in travail destined to bring forth some modernized or at least modified doctrine. Equally hopeful is the ending of the United Nations' ostrich-like refusal to admit the existence of population as a problem. In December 1962 the UN General Assembly approved nemine contradicente a resolution emphasizing the importance of the question. Unfortunately, its teeth were extracted: the clause empowering the UN to give technical assistance for programs of population-control on request from governments was rejected, through the negative votes of most Catholic countries, and the abstention of the Communist bloc (as well as of the U.S. and Canada). I sometimes wonder what Roman Catholics feel about this fellow-traveling with Communism on one of the world's major issues.

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In spite of all this, however, the prospect remains gloomily urgent and the practical question clamors for an answer---what must we do, and how should we do it?

In the long term we have to think out a new kind of cultural, social and economic system for the human species. The population explosion has forced us to ask anew the fundamental question, "What are people for?": and the only answer that seems relevant in the contemporary world is fulfillment in the widest sense---greater personal fulfillment for more individual human beings, and more fulfilling achievements by more human societies.

Accordingly, we must first set ourselves to discover what fulfillment really means, what it involves in different regions and for different types of people, and then start planning for a Fulfillment Society. In particular, we must try to make education provide as much fulfillment as possible, and must rethink the whole problem of jobs, employment and leisure.

On the practical side, we must try to utilize the world's resources, material and non-material, environmental and human, to the best advantage. This means making ecology our central science. Ecology is the science of relations---relations between organisms (including man) with their environment (including other organisms). Applied ecology is aimed at achieving an optimum relation between man and his environment, with a balanced pattern of land use and proper conservation of resources of every kind. Everywhere, but perhaps most urgently in developing countries, children should be introduced to science, not by way of physics and chemistry, mechanics and technology, but by way of physiology and ecology, health and conservation.

We must rethink the relation between the haves and the have-nots, the developed and the underdeveloped countries. The very concept of aid and assistance, with its underlying idea of the rich dispensing a little charity to the world's unfortunate poor, has become out of date. We have now to think in the positive terms of joint participation in the over-all task of world development. This is in the interest of all. If the gap between rich and poor is not narrowed, the revolution of expectation in the have-not countries will turn sour, and will lead to anti-Western envy, local violence and political upheaval, with the likelihood of authoritarian take-over---military. Communist or other---and the possibility of revolution or even war.

Population is a key factor in aided development, for aid can readily be swallowed up by its too rapid increase. Bankers very properly look into the credit-worthiness of applicants for loans. I am confident that in the quite near future, aid-giving agencies, whether international, regional, national or private, will look into what I may call the demographic credit-worthiness of applicants for aid. If they consider that its benefits will be washed down the drain by an excessive flood of births, they will try to persuade the applicant to adopt a strong program of population-control, and will channel some of the aid into its execution---through special advisors, training projects, research facilities, and money for contraceptive devices.

The various UN agencies, particularly the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, but also Unesco and the International Labor Organization, should take population and its problems fully into their cognizance, and the UN itself should boldly enunciate a global population policy. I would hope that this would include large-scale research on human reproduction and methods for its control: in any case, the most highly developed countries, notably the U.S.A. and Britain, should certainly be encouraged to undertake such research, and should make the results freely available to all nations.

The Population Division of the UN should be further strengthened, and member states should be encouraged to ask for specialist surveys of their particular population problems.

When birth-control servicing has been adopted, as here and there in Britain and the U. S., it proves highly profitable to the local community by cutting the cost of welfare services, reducing illegitimacy and abortion, besides lifting heavy loads of misery and frustration from the shoulders of unfortunate mothers and their overlarge families. And on a national scale, as in Japan, it has transformed the prospects of the whole country.

Population-control is just as essential in developed as in underdeveloped countries, notably in overcrowded ones like Britain or Holland, and over-mechanized and overproducing ones with a high birth-rate like the U.S. At anything like the present rate of increase, the U. S. will become an almost intolerable habitat within a century.

In all countries, the obvious urgency is to incorporate family planning and birth-control advice into the official medical and health systems in every field---research, teaching, training, administration, publicity, education---and at every level from local to national. Only so will it reach those who need it most---the poor, the deprived and the ignorant.

Every important country or region should set up some high-level institution for studying and advising on population problems and collaborating in tackling them. It could be an official Demographic Institute, or a government-aided university department, or a privately supported center attached to a university, like the splendid Center for Population Studies just set up in Harvard: The important thing is that it should be the fountainhead of scientific information and unbiased opinion on population problems of every kind.

In addition, there is need for unofficial bodies capable both of giving advice and of exerting pressure on authority in regard to population policy, besides educating public opinion.

If practical family planning and birth-control are incorporated into government services, perhaps the International Planned Parenthood Federation could add another P to its title and become the Planned Parenthood and Population Federation---or even, since Parenthood is included in Population, proclaim its goal simply as Planned Population. But in any case, a body of this sort, with branches in every country, is badly needed, and the I.P.P.F. should certainly help in setting it up.

At the moment, a sense of urgency is what is most essential---and pressure to overcome the deliberate counter-pressures of Roman Catholicism and Russian Marxism, of competitive profit-hungry business and competitive power-hungry nationalism, and the non-deliberate but equally powerful resistances of tradition and vested interest, of ignorance and stupidity. Pressure on local government bodies and city administrations, on institutions, on trade unions and medical associations, on religious and humanist bodies, on national governments, on international associations and the UN itself. One of the main jobs of a Planned Population Association would be to plan campaigns as necessary, and enlist the cooperation of as many groups and organizations as possible in executing them---religious and humanist, social and educational, commercial and professional, trade-union and employer, UN associations and, I would hope, political parties.

But these are matters of debatable detail. Let me get back to the core of the matter. The population explosion has led to a very real crisis, a turning point in human affairs. It has provided a good example of the Marxist thesis that change in quantity can turn into change in quality. Increase in the quantity of population is bringing about a decrease in the quality of human existence.

During all the millennia of man's life on this earth up to the present, it has been essentially right for him to obey the allegedly divine injunction to increase and multiply: Today it has become wrong to do so. It has become wrong and indeed immoral to put obstacles in the way of bringing the rate of increase down, as Roman Catholics, puritans, fundamentalists, Marxists, and other frightened, dogmatic or reactionary groups have been doing. It is immoral because it is condemning millions of human beings to a continuance and a worsening of avoidable misery, poverty, ignorance and frustration. It has become wrong---ethically and socially, nationally and internationally wrong---for any family, class, tribe or nation to have a high birth-rate. Population-control has become linked with our duty and our destiny, our compassion and our hope.

It all boils down to one insistent question: Do you, we, mankind, want more people at a lower level of existence and a higher risk of disaster, or fewer people at a higher level, with more opportunities for fulfillment? Do we want man's possibilities smothered or cherished? Do we want mere quantity of human units---or better quality of life?