Republished 1975 by Special Arrangement THE with Ballantine Books POPULATION BOMB Copyright (c) 1968, 1971 by Paul R. Ehrlich (Revised)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ehrlich, Paul R The population bomb.
Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich Reprint of the 1968 ed. published by Ballantine Books, New York, in series: A Sierra Club-Ballantine book. Bibliography: p. I. Population. I. Title. HB875.E35 1975 301.32 75-35762 ISBN 0-89190-867-7
RIVER CITY PRESS, a division of The American Reprint Co./Rivercity Press Box 476 Jackson Heights. New York 11372
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PROLOGUE
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to "stretch" the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distn'bution of whatever food is available. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accom panied by determined and successful efforts at popula tion control Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs not just of individual families, but of society as a whole. Nothing could be more misleading to our children than our present afiluent society. They will inherit a totally different world, a world in which the standards, politics, and economics of the past· decade are dead. As the most influential nation in the world today, and its largest consumer, the United States cannot stand isolated. We are today involved in the events leading to famine and ecocatastrophe; tomorrow we may be destroyed by them. Our position requires that we take immediate actlon at home and promote effective action worldwide. We xi xii THE POPUUl.TION BOMB must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. Americans must also change their way of living so as to minimire their impact on the world's resources and environment. Programs which combine ecologically sound agricultural development and population control must be established and sup ported in underdeveloped countries. While this is being done, we must take action to reverse the deterioration FOREWORD of our environment before our planet is permanently ruined. It cannot be overemphasized, however, that no Man can undo himself with no other force than his changes in behavior or technology can save us unless own brutality. It is a new brutality, coming swiftly at we can achieve control over the size of the human a time when, as Loren Eiseley says, "the need is for a population. The birth rate must be brought into· balance gentler race. ·But the band that hefted the axe against with the death rate or mankind will breed itself mto the ice, the tiger, and the bear now fondles the machine oblivion. We can no longer afford merely to treat the gun as lovingly." · symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer The roots of the new brutality, it will become clear itself must be cut out. from The Population Bomb, are in the lack of popu lati.OD. control. There is, we must hope and predict, a chance to exert control in time. We would like to pre dict that organizations which, like the Sierra Oub, have been much tOo calm about the ultimate threat to mankind, will awaken themselves and others, and awaken them with an urgency that will be necessary to fulfi11ment of the predtCtion that mankind will survive. It was only twelve years ago that we even sug gested, in any Sierra Oub publication, that uncon trolled population was a menace. We went far enough to write: "People are recognizing that we cannot for ever continue to multiply and subdue the earth without losing our standard of life and the natural beauty that must be part of it. .•• These are the years of decision the decision of men to stay the flood of man." In the next two years we :Worritd about the battle of man versus his own numbers and were concerned that growth itse1f was growing and were not joyful about xiii xiv THE POPLILATION BOMB the imminence of California's outstripping New York. , It was Professor Raymond Cowles who shook us loose with a provocative address before a Sierra Oub I conference, "The Meaning of Wilderness to Science." What in the late fifties had seemed heretical soon was not so. For the complaints that I had received about mentioning population problems in early speeches, there were more vociferous complaints if I forgot to mention the big problem. In just two or three years it became possi"ble to question growth, to suggest that DNA was greater than GNP, to predict that man had Chapter 1 enough genius to require that science and technology THE PROBLEM be put to- good purpose. He could limit his numbers. He could limit his heretofore unslackened appetite for destroying wilderness. He could go back over the nine I have understood the population explosion intellec tenths or so of the earth that had already felt his touch, tually for a long time. I came to understand it emotion sometimes a gentle touch but too often brutal, and do ~y one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago. My better where he had been. He could start with Man wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in hattan, or Los Angeles. l· an ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fteas. The Whatever resources the wildemess still held would ! only !11ttcti.onal gear was third. As we crawled through not sustain IUm in his old habits of growing and reach the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The tempera ing without limits. Wildemess could, however, provide ture was well over 100, and the air was a haze of answers for questions he had not yet learned how to dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. ask·. He could predict that the day of creation was not P~J?le eating, people washing, people sleeping. People over, that there would be wiser men, and they would , . VISlting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their thank him for leaving the source of those answers. ···+~ hands through the taxi window, begging. People Wilderness· would remain part of his geography of hope, ' defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. as Wallace Stegner put it, and could, merely because People herding animals. People, people, people, people. wilderness endured on the planet, prevent man's world As we moved slowly through the mob hand bom from becoming a cage. squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooling fires gave The good predictions could be entertained-the the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our notion of predicting a more and more desirable future, hotel? All three of us were, frankly, frightened. It not just a more and more crowded one. seemed that anything could happen-but, of course -DAVID BROWER nothing did. Old India hands will laugh at our reaction: We were just some overprivileged tourists, unaccustomed to the sights ~d sounds of India. Perhaps, but the prob lems of Delhi and Calcutta are our problems too. Ameri- 1 2 THE POPULATION BOMB cans have helped to create fl.!e_!1-1; we help to prevent t?eir solution. We must _all.learn to identify with the plight of our less fortunate fellows on Spaceship Earth if we are to help both them and ourselves to survive.
Too Many People Americans are beginning to realize that the under developed countries of· the world face an inevitable population-food crisis. Each year food production in these 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 con tinue to its logical conclusion: mass starvation. The rich may continue to get richer, but the more numerous poor are going to get poorer. Of these poor, a minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the nllmbers that will be starving before the end of the century. And it iS now too late to take action to save many of those people. However, most Americans are not aware thai the U.S. and other develc~p~:cf_CQtmm~ _$()have ii· problem with overp<>p1Ilatl00:. Ratlt_e;r.J;bmi-sufferlng from food short ages, these countries show symptoms· in the form of environmeJ!~~~te!i~!i:C!'!_~~--41~.. !J.!ffl~ty in obtaining resourceS --~-support theb: .. afilu.~n,ce. .... In a book abOut population there is a temptation to stun the reader with an avalanche of statistics. rn spare you most, but not· all, of that. After all, no matter how you slice it, population :iS- a numbers game. Perhaps the 3 4 THE POPULATION BOMB THE PROBLEM 5 best way to impress you with numbers is to tell you about his travel. Perhaps he could take elevators through all the udoubling time"-the time necessary for the popula 1,000 residential stories but could travel only within a t.' tion to double in size. circle of a few htJndred yards' radius on any floor. This It has been estimated that the human population of would permit, however, each person to choose bis 8000 B.c. was about five million people, taking perhaps friends from among some ten million people! And, as one million years to get there from two and a half mil Fremlin points out, entertainment on the worldwide TV lion. The population did not reach 500 million until should be excellent, for at any time "one could expect a1most 10,000 years later-··about 1650 A.D. This·means some ten million Shakespeares and rather more Beatles it doubled roughly once every thousand years or so. It to be alive." reached a billion people around 1850, doubling in some / Could growth of the human population of the Earth 200 years. It took only 80 years or so for the next dou continue beyond that point? Not according to Fremlin. bling, as the population reached two billion around 1930. We would have reached a "heat limit." People them We have not completed the next doubling to four billion selves, as well as their activities, convert other forms of yet, but we now have well over three and a half billion energy into heat which must be dissipated. Jn order to people. The doubling time at present seems, to be permit this excess heat to radiate directly from the top about 35 years.1 Quite a reduction in doubling times: of the ''world building" directly into space, the atmos 1,000,000 years, 1,000 years, 200 years, 80 years, 35 phere would have been pumped into flasks under the sea years. Perhaps the meaning of a doubling time of around well before the limiting population size was reached. The 35 years is best brought home by a theoretical exercise. preclse limit would depend on the technology of the day. Let's examine what might happen on the absurd assump At a population size of one. billion billion people, the tion that the population continued to double every 35 temperature of the "world toof'' would be kept around years into the indefinite future. the melting point of iron to radiate away the human heat .. If growth continued at that rate for about 900 years, '· generated. / there would be some 60,000,000,000,000,000 .people on But, you say, surely Science (with a capital "S") will the face of the earth. Sixty million billion people~ This find a way for us to occupy the other planets of our solar is about 100 persons for each square yard of the Earth's system and eventually of other stars before we get all surface, land and sea. A British physicist, J. H. Fremlin,1 that crowded. Skip for a moment the virtual certainty guessed that such a multitude might be housed in a con that those planets are uninhabitable. Forget also the in- tinuous 2,000-story building covering our entire planet. 1 surmountable logistic problems of moving billions of
The upper 1,000 stories would contain only the appa ,.\ / people off the i;artb. Frem.lin has made some interesting ratus for running this gigantic warren. Ducts, pipes, / calculations on how much time we could buy by occu wires, elevator shafts, etc., would occupy about half of / pying the planets of the solar system. For instance, at the space in the bottom 1,000 stories. This would leave I any given time it would take only about 50 years to three or four yards of floor space for each person. I will ! populate Venus, Mercury, Mars, the moon, and the leave to your imagination the physical details of exist / moons of Jupiter and Saturn to the same population ence in this ant heap, except to point out that all would \ density as Earth.A · · not be black. Probably each person would be limited in ~at if the fantastic problems of reaching and colO- 6 THE POPULATION BOMB THE PROBLEM 7 nizing the other planets of the solar system, such as rapid growth rates, and those with relatively slow growth Jupiter and Uranus, .can be solved? It would take only rates. The first group, making up about two-thirds of about 200 years to fill them "Earth-full." So we could the world population, coincides closely with what are perhaps gain 250 years of time for population growth in kn.own as the "underdeveloped countries" (UDCs). the solar system after we had reached an absolute limit The UDCs are not industrialized, tend to have ineffi on Earth. What then? We can't ship our surplus to the cient agriculture, very small gross national pr:xtucts, stars. Professor Garrett Hardin" of the University of high illiteracy rates -and related problems. That s what California at Santa Barbara has ·dealt effectively with i UDCs are technically, but a short definition of under this fantasy. Using extremely optimistic assumptions, he I developed is "hungry." Most Latin American, African, has calculated that Americans, by cutting their standard and Asian countries fall into this category. The second of living down to 18 % of its present level, could in oM group consists of the "overdeveloped countries" year set aside enough capital to finance the exportation ( ODCs). ones are modem industrial nations, such. as to the stars of one day's increa8e in the population of the United States, Canada, most European countries, the world. Israel the USSR, Japan, and Australia. They consume Interstellar transport for surplus people presents an a dis~roportionate amount of the world's resources and amusing prospect. Since the ships would take generations are the major polluters. Most, but_ by no means all, 6 to reach most stars, the only people who could be tran. people in these countries are adequately nourished. ported would be those willing to exercise strict birth Doubling times in the UDCs range around 20 to 35 control. Population explosions on space ships would be years. Examples of these times (from the 1970 figures disastrous. Thus we would have to export our respon released by the Population Reference Bureau) ~: Earth sible people, leaving the irresponstole at home on Kenya, 23 years; Nigeria, 27; Turkey, 26; Indonesia, to breed. 24; Philippines, it; Brazil, 25; Costa Rica, 19; and El Enough of fantasy. Hopefully, you are convinced that . Salvador, 21. Think of what it means for the popula the population will have to stop growing sooner or later tion of a country to double in 25 years. In order just to and that the extremely remote possibility of expanding keep living standards at the present inadequate level, into outer space offers no escape from the laws of popu the food available for the people must be doubled. Every lation growth. H you still want to hope for the stars, just structure and road must be duplicated. The amount of remember that, at the current growth rate, in a few power must be doubled. The capacity of the transport thousand years everything in the visible universe would system must be doubled. The· number of trained doctors, be converted into people, and the ball of people would nurses teachers, and administrators must be doubled. . be .expanding with the speed of lightl1 Unfortunately, This ~ould be a fantastically difficult job in the United even 900 years is much too far in the. future for those States-a rich countrY with a fine agricultural system, of us· concerned with the population explosion. As you immense industries, and access to abundant resources. will see, the next nine years will probably tell the story. Think of what it ineans to a country with none of these. Of course, population growth is not occurriJ,lg uni Remember also that in virtually all UDCs, people formly over the face of the Earth. Indeed, countries are divided rather neatly into two groups: those with have gotten the word about the be~ life .it is poss!ble - to have. They have seen colored pictures m magazmes 8 THE POPULATION BOMB THE PROBLEM 9 of the miracles of Western technology. They have seen tion problems. First of all, most of them are already automobiles and airplanes. They have seen American \ overpopulated. They are overpopulat¢ by the simple and Europe.an movies. Many have seen refrigerators, \ criterion that they are not able to produce enough food tractors, and even TV sets. Almost all have heard tran to feed their populations. It is true that they have the sistor radios. They know that a better life is possible. \ money to buy food,. but when food is no longer available They have what we like to call "rising expectations." H \ for sale they will find the money rather indigestible. twice as many people are to be happy, the miracle of doubling what they now have will not be enough. It will imilarly,mselves ODCs. have thereso~are ov_~·. . ... Wa. tQt.ed-beea. s11pport-. :use. their th.ey afiluent do·n· ot only maintain today's standard of living. There will ieties; they. mPSt. coopt. much more·· than their., fair have to be a tripling or better. Needless to say, they are are of the world's. wealth of minerals.and energy. And not going to be happy. )they are overp()puJa:ted because they have. exceeded the Doubling times for the populations of the ODCs tend 'capaclfY of tiieu environments to.dispose of their.wastes~ to be in the 50-to-200-year range. Examples of 1970 Remember, overpopulation does not normally mean too doubling times are the United States, 70 years; Austria, many people for the area of a country, but too many 175; Denmark, 88; Norway, 78; United Kingdom, 140; people in relation to the necesmties and amenities of life.. Poland, 78; Russia, 70; Italy, 88; Spain, ·70; and Japan, Overpopulation occurs when numbers threaten values. 63. These are industriali7.ed countries that have under ODCs also share with the UDCs serious problems of gone the so-called demographic tranSition-a transition popaj,ation. ~tr.J"butio!l~ Their urban centers are getting from high to low growth rates. As industrialization in.ore and more cro1iided relative to the countryside. This progr~ children became less important to parents problem is not as severe in ODCs as. it is in the UDCs as extra hands to work on the farm and as support in (if current trends should continue, which they cannot, old age. At the same time they became a financial drag Calcutta would have 66 million inhabitants Jn the year -expensive to raise and educate. Presumably these 2000), but they are very serious and speedily worsening. were the reasons for a slowing of population growth In the United States, one of the more rapidly growing after industrialization. They boil down to a simple fact ones, we hear constantly of the headaches related to -people just wanted to have fewer children. growing cities: not just garbage in our environment, but It is important to emphasize, however, that the demo overcrowded highways, burgeoning slums, deteriorating grapliic transition does not result in zero population school systems, rising tax and crime rates, riots, and growth, but in a growth rate which in many of the most other social disorders. Indeed, social and environmental important ODCs results in populations doubling every problems not only increase With growing population and seventy years or so. This means, for instance, that even urbanization, they tend to increase at an even faster rate. if most UDCs were to undergo a· dem,ographic transition Adding more people to an area increases the damage (of. which there is no sign) the world would still be done by each .individual. Doubling the population faced by catastrophic population growth. No growth rate normally much more than doubles environmental de can be sustained in tM long run. terioration. 7 Saying.that the ODCs have undergone a demographic Demographically, the whole problem is quite simple. transition thus does not mean that they have no popula- A population will continue to grow as long as the birth 10 THE POPULATION BOMB THE PROBLEM 11 rate exceeds the death rate-if immigration and emi There are some professiOnal optimists around who gration are not occurring. It is, of course, the balance like to greet evecy sign of dropping birth rates with wild between birth rate and death rate that is critical. The pronouncements about the end of the population explo birth rate is the number of births per thousand people sion. They are a little like a person who, after a low tem per year in the population. The death rate is the number ~rature of five below zero on December 21, interprets of deaths per thousand people per year. s Subtracting the a low of only three· below zero on December 22 as a death rate from· the birth rate, ignoring migration, gives cheery sign of approaching spring. Fll'St of all, birth the rate of increase. If the birth rate is 30 per thousand rates, along with all demographic statistics, show short per year, and the death rate is 10 per thousand per year, term fluctuations caused by many factors. For instance, then the rate of increase is 20 per thousand per year the birth rate depends rather heavily on the number of (30 - 10 =- 20). Expressed as a percent (rate per hun women at reproductive age. In the United States the dred people), the rate of 20 per thousand becomes 2 % • low birth rates of the late 1960's are being replaced by If the rate of increase is 2 % , then the doubling time will higher rates as more post World War II "baby boom" be 35 years. Note that if you simply added 20 people children move into their reproductive years. In Japan, per thousand per year to the population, it would take 1966, ~e Year of the Fire Horse, was a year of very SO years to add a second thousand people ( 20 X SO :::a . low birth rates. There is widespread belief that girls born 1,000).. But the doubling time is actually much less in the Year of the Fire Horse make poor wives, and because populations grow at compound interest rates. Japanese couples try to avQid ·giving birth in that year Just as interest dollars themselves earn interest, so peo because they are afraid of having daughters. ple added to population produce more people. It's grow But, I repeat, it is the relationship between birth rate ing at compound interest that makes populations double and death rate that is most critical. Indonesia, Laos, and so much more rapidly than seems possible. Look at the Haiti all had ·birth rates around 46 per thousand in 1966. relationship between the annual percent increase (in Costa Rica's birth rate was 41 per thousand Good for terest rate) and the doubling time of the population Costa Rica? Unfortunately, not very. Costa Rica's death (time for your money to double) : rate was less than nine per thousand, while the other countries all had death rates above 20 per thousand. The Annual percent increase Doubling time population of Costa Rica in 1966 was doubling every 1.0 70 17 years, while the doubling times of Indonesia, Laos, 2.0 35 and Haiti were all above 30 years. Ah, but, you say, it 3.0 24 was good for Costa Rica-fewer people per thousand 4.0 17 were dying each year. Fine for a few years.perhaps, but what then? Some 50% of the people in Costa Rica are Those are all the calculations-I promise. If you are under 15 yean old. As they get older, they will need interested in more details on how demographic figuring more and more food in a world with less and less. In is done, you may enjoy reading Thompson and Lewis's 1983 they will have twice as many mouths to feed as they excellent book, Population Problems,9 or my book, had in 1966, if the 1966 trend continues. Where will the Population, Resources, Environment. 10 food come from? Today the death rate in Costa. Rica 12 THE POPULATION BOMB THE PROBLEM 13 is low in part because they have a large number of more successful breeders than tJieir relatives. Facet num physicians in proportion to their population. How do ber one of our bind-the urge to reproduce has been you suppose those physicians will keep the death rate fixed in us by billions of years of evolution. down when there's not enough food to keep people Of course through all those years of evolution, our alive? ancestors w.ere fighting a continual battle to keep the One of the most ominous facts of the current situation birth rate ahead of the. deatk rate. That they were suc is that over 40% of the population of the underveloped cessful is a~ted to by our very existence, for, if the world Is made up of people under 15 years old. As that death rate had overtaken the birth rate for any substan mass of young people moves mto its -reproductive years tial period of time, the evolutionary line leading to man during the next decade, wf/re going to see the greatest would have gone extinct. Among our apelike ancestors, baby boom of all time. Those youngsters are the reason a few million years ago, .it was very di:fticult for a mother for all the-ominous predictions for the year 2000. They to rear her children successfully. Most of the offspring are the gunpowder for tile population explosion. died before they reached reproductive age. The death How did we get into this bind? It all :happened a long rate was near the birth rate. Then anotlier factor entered time ago, and the story involves the process of natural the picturc-cultural evolution was added to biological selection, the development of culture, and man's- swol evolution. len head. The essence of success in evolution is repro Culture can be loosely defined as the body of non duction. Indeed, natural selection is simply defined as genetic information which people pass from generation differential reproduction· of genetic types. That is, if to generation. It is the accumulated knowledge that, in people with blue eyes have more cbildren on the aver the.old days, was passed on_entirely by word of mouth, age than those with brown eyes, natural selection is painting, and demonstration. several thousand years ago occurring. More genes for blue eyes will be passed on the written word was added to .the means of cultural to the next generation than will genes for brown eyes. transmission. Today culture is passed on in these ways, Should this continue, the population will have progres and also through television, computer tapes, motion pic sively larger and larger proportions of blue-eyed people. tures, records, blueprints, and other media. Culture is This differential reproduction of genetic types is the all the information man P<>sseMes except for that which driving force of evolution; it has been driving evolution is stored in the chemical language of his genes. for billions of years. Whatever types produced more The large size of the human brain evolved in response offspring became the commoi1 types. Viltually all popu to the development of cultural information. A big brain lations contain very many different genetic types (for is an advantage when dealing with such information. reasons that need not concern us), and some are always Big-brained individuals were able to deal more success outreproduclng others. As I said, reproduction is the fully with the culture of their group. They were thus key to winning the evolutionary game. Any structure, more successful . reproductively than their smaller physiological process, or pattern of behavior that leads brained relatives. They passed on their genes for big · to greater reproductive success will ~nd to be perpetu brains to their numel'QlJS o1fspring. They also added ·to ated. The entire process by which man developed in.. the accumulating store .of cultural information increas- . . ' volves thousands of millennia of our ancestors being mg slightly the premium placed on brain size in the next 14 THE POPULATION BOMB THE PROBLEM 15 generation. A self-reinforcing selective trend developed tion size doubtless increased slowly but steadily as hu -a trend toward increased brain size. 11 man populations expanded out of the Afclcan cradle of But there was, quite literally, a rub. Babies had bigger our species. and bigger heads. There were limits to how large a Then about 10,000 years ago a major change oc womanJs pelvis could conveniently become. To make a curred-the agricultural revolution. People began to long story short, the strategy of evolution was not to giv~ up hunting food and settled down to grow it. Sud make a woman bell-shaped and relatively immobile, but denly some of the risk was removed from life. The to accept the problem of having babies who ·were help chances of dying of starvation diminished greatly in some less for a long period while their brains. grew after human groups. Other threats associated with the no birth.12 How could the mother defend and care. for her madic life were also reduced, perhaps balanced by new infant during its unusually long period of helplessness? threats of disease and large-scale warfare associated with She couldn't, ~ Papa hung around. The girls are still the development of cities. But the overall result was a working on that problem, but an essential step was to more secure existence than before, and the human popu get rid of the short, well-defined breeding season char lation grew more rapidly. Around 1800, when the stand~ acteristic of most mammals. The year-round sexuality of ard of living in what are tooay the ODCs W8$ dramati the human female, the long period of infant dependence cally increasing due to industrialization, population on the female, the evolution of the family group, all are I growth really began to accelerate. The development of at the roots of our present problem. They are essential medical science was the straw that broke the camel's ingredients in the vast social phenomenon that we call back. While lowering death rates in the ODC&. was due sex. Sex is not simply an act leading to the production in part to other factors, there is no question that ''instant of offspring. It is a varied and complex cultural phenom death control," exported by the ones, has been respon enon penetrating into all aspects of our lives-one in sible for the drastic lowering of death rates in the UDCs. volving our self-esteem, our choice of friends, cars, and Medical science, with its efficient public health programs, leaders. It is tightly interwoven with our mythologies and has been able to depress the death rate with astonishing history. Sex in human beings is n~ary for the pro rapidity and at the same time drastically increase the duction of young,. but it also evolved to ensure their .. birth rate; healthier people have more babies. successful rearing. Facet number two of our bind-our The power of exported death control can best be seen urge to reproduce is hopelessly entwined with most of by an examination of the classic case of Ceylon's assault our other urges. on malaria after World War .rr. Between 1933and1942 Of course, in the early days the whole system did not the death rate due directly to malaria was reported as prevent a very high mortality among the young, as well almost .two per thousand. This rate, however, repre as among the older members of the group. Hunting and sented only a portion of the malaria deaths, as many food-gathering is a risky business. Cavemen had to throw were reported as being due to "pyrexia."ls Indeed, in very impressive cave bears out · of their cav~ before 1934-1935 a malaria epidemic may have been directly people could move in. Witch doctors and shamans had responsible for fully half of the deaths on the kla.nd. I.it a less than perfect record at treating wounds and curing addition, malaria, which. infected a large portion of the disease. Life was short, if not sweet. Man's total popula- population, made people susceptible to many other dis- 16 THE POPULATION BOMB THE PROBLEM 17 eases. It thus contributed to the death rate indirectly as ~e two. Basically, then, there are only two kinds of solu well as directly. tions to the population problem. One is a "birth t I ti" " • hi ra e The introduction of DDT in 1946 brought rapid con so u on, m w ch we find ways to lower the birth rate trol over the mosquitoes which carry malaria. As a ~e other is a "death rate solution," in which ways t~ result, the death rate on the island was halved in l~ r&se the death rate--war, famine, pestilence--find us. than a decade. The death rate in Ceylon in 1945 was 22. The pr~blem. could h~ve been avoided by population It dropped 34% between 1946 and 1947 and moved control, m which mankind consciously adjusted the birth down to ten in 1954. Since the &harp postwar drop it rate so f:hat a "death rate solution" did not have to has continued to decline and now stands at eight. Al-· occur. though part of the drop is doubtless due to the killing of other insects which carry disease and to other public health measures, most of it can be accounted for by the control of malaria. Victory over malaria, yellow fever, smallpox,. cholera, and other infectious diseases has been responsible for similar plunges in death rate throughout most of the UDCs. In the decade 1940-1950 the death rate de clined 46% in Puerto Rico, 43% in Formosa, and 23 % in Jamaica. In a sample of 18 undeveloped areas the average decline in death rate between 1945 and 1950 was 24%. · It is, of course, socially very acceptable to reduce the death rate. Billions of years of evolution have given us all a powerlul will to live. Intervening in ~e birth rate goes against our evolutionary values. During all those centuries of our evolutionary past, the individuals who had the most children passed on their genetic endow ment in greater quantities than those who reproduced less. Their genes dominate our heredity today. All our biological urges are .for more reproduction, and they are all too often reinforced by our culture. In brief, death control goes with the grain, birth control against it. In summary, the world's population will continue to grow as long as the birth rate exceeds the death rate; it's as simple as that. When it stops growing or starts to shrink, it will mean that either the birth rate has gone down or the death rate has gone up or a combination of THE PROBLEM 19 an American. A New Republic articleH estimated that ~ve million Indian children die each year of malnutri I. tion. Dumont and Rosier in their book The Hungry Futureu estimate that 10 to 20 million people will starve to death this year, mostly children. Senator George McGovem16 has called hunger ''the chief killer of man." Through the first decade foll9wing World War II food pr?'1uction per person in the UDCs kept up with population growth. Then, sometime around 1958 ''the Too Little Food stork passed the plow."17 Serious transfers of food began from the ODCs to the UDCs. As food got scarcer, eco Why did I pick on the next nine years instead of the nomic laws of supply and demand began to take effect in next 900 for finding a solution to the population crisis? the UDCs. Food prices began to rise. Marginal land One answer is that the world is rapidly running out of began to ~ brought into production-as evidenced by food. And famine, of course, could be one way to reach reduced yields per acre. In short, all the signs of an a death rate solution to the population problem. In fact, approaching food crisis began to appear. Then in 1965- the battle to feed humanity is already lost, in the sense . 1966 came the first dramatic blow. that we will not be able to prevent larg~e famines in In 1965-1966 mankind suffered a shocking defeat in the next decade or so. It is difficult to ~ what the ex what is now popu.18rly called the "war on hunger." In act scale and consequences of the famines will be. But 1966, while the population of the world increased by there will be famines. Let's look at the situation today. some 70 million people, there was no compensatory in At least half of the people of the world are now crease in food production. According to the United Na undernourished (have too little food) or malnourished tions F?