Too Many People

It won't be long now until the mistreated earth will be unable to feed the ever-multiplying billions of people who swarm over it. This is the considered warning of Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society, in a recently published book, Our Plundered Planet (Little, Brown; $2.50).

The human race is enjoying what zoologists sometimes call a "breeding storm." In 1630 there were about 400,000,000 people on earth. By 1830 the earth's population had doubled. By 1900 it had doubled again: to 1,600,000,000. Now the total is over two billion, and the increase is about 1% (20,000,000 people) a year.

Thus far, the increase has been taken care of chiefly by cultivating new land. But this recourse, Osborn thinks, is pretty nearly exhausted. Almost all the good land is already cultivated. Most of the remainder has something wrong with it: bad climate, bad soil or both. There is still room for pioneers, but not enough to make much difference.

Much of the world's best land has been so badly treated that its productivity is falling steadily. Osborn retells the familiar tale of "soil-mining," deforestation and erosion all over the world. As people grow more numerous, the soil they depend on grows poorer & poorer. The low point has almost been reached in the Near East, where man-made deserts occupy large areas that were once fertile and populous. Like most conservationists, Osborn is something of an alarmist. He tends to underestimate the ability of modern agricultural science to revive maltreated soil, make deserts productive by irrigation and increase crop yields by fertilization and better farming methods. He doesn't think much of the tropics, though modern methods can make tropical soils produce large amounts of food. He neglects the very real possibility of making food from waste cellulose and of increasing enormously the harvest of the sea.

But Osborn's basic thesis is reasonable. Improvements in food-getting require better organization and discipline than most nations possess. And even if all of them were put in practice, that would only postpone the crisis. The human race cannot continue to increase indefinitely at ts present rate without reaching the starvation point--as India has done already.

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