TABLE OF CONTENTS
- PROLOGUE
- FOREWORD
-
- 1. THE PROBLEM
- TOO MANY PEOPLE
TOO LITTLE FOOD
A DYING PLANET
2. THE ENDS OF THE ROAD- 3. WHAT IS BEING DONE?
- FAMILY PLANNING AND OTHER FAILURES
MULTIPLYING BREAD
PROTECTING OUR ENVIRONMENT
4. WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE?
- GETTING THE U S HOUSE IN ORDER
REALISM AND INTERNATIONAL AID
THE CHANCES OF SUCCESS
5. WHAT CAN YOU DO?
- WRITING LETTERS
ORGANIZING ACTION GROUPS
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT
PROSELYTIZING FRIENDS AND ASSOCIATES
6. WHAT IF I'M WRONG?-
- APPENDIX
- FOOTNOTES
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
-
TOO MANY PEOPLE
We of the affluent nations are beginning to realize that the
undeveloped countries of the world face an inevitable population-food
crisis. Each year food production in undeveloped countries falls
a bit further behind burgeoning population growth, and people
go to bed a little bit hungrier. While there are temporary or
local reversals of this trend, it now seems inevitable that
it will continue to its logical conclusion: mass starvation.
The rich are going to get richer, but the more numerous poor
are going to get poorer. Of these poor, a minimum of three and
one-half million will starve to death this year, mostly children.
But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will
be starving in a decade or so. And it is now too late to take
action to save many of those people...
It has been estimated that the human population of 6000 BC
was about five million people, taking perhaps one million years
to get there from two and a half million. The population did
not reach 500 million until almost 8,000 years later - about
1650 AD. This means it doubled roughly once every thousand years
or so. It reached a billion people around 1850, doubling in
some 200 years. It took only 80 years or so for the next doubling,
as the population reached two billion around 1930. We have not
completed the next doubling to four billion yet, but we now
have well over three billion people. The doubling time at present
seems to be about 37 years. Quite a reduction in doubling times:
1,000,000 years, 1,000 years, 200 years, 80 years, 37 years.
Perhaps the meaning of a doubling time of around 37 years is
best brought home by a theoretical exercise. Let's examine what
might happen on the absurd assumption that the population continued
to double every 37 years into the indefinite future.
If growth continued at that rate for about 900 years, there
would be some 60,000,000,000,000,000 people on the face of the
earth. Sixty million billion people. This is about 100 persons
for each square yard of the Earth's surface, land and sea...
Back..
