A Step Farther Out (7 page)

Actually, world agriculture is keeping up with population. At the Mexico City meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975, Dr. H. A. B. Parpia, the senior professional of the UN's Food And Agricultural Organization, told me that just about every country raises more than enough food to be self-sufficient. The food is grown, but sometimes not harvested; or if harvested, spoils before it can be eaten. In many countries vermin get more of the crop than the people: insects out eat people almost everywhere. The pity is that the technology to harvest and preserve enough for everyone exists right now.

Now this essay is not intended to be a Pollyanna exercise. There's no excuse for relaxing and saying that hunger is a myth. It isn't. But simple food storage technologies, and research into non-damaging pesticides and pest control methodologies, could stop famine in most of those parts of the world where that horseman still stalks the land. Other simple technologies—even Mylar linings for traditional dung-smeared grain storage pits—would save lives.

We know how to do it; but we won't unless we're willing to try. We won't get anywhere sitting around crying "Doom!"

Yet according to Dr. Ehrlich's book, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

Fortunately that didn't happen; but the doomsayer viewpoint, which did not stop agro-engineers from making efforts despite the flat prediction that their efforts were useless, did invade our schools so successfully that a new generation of students believes in Doom as thoroughly as ever did a Crusader in the holiness of his cause.

* * *

The other side of the coin was expressed in the Hudson Institute's THE YEAR 2000, which points out that the level of rice yield per acre in India has not yet equaled what the Japanese could do in the Twelfth Century. Another analyst, Colin Clark, has shown that if the Indian farmer could reach the production levels of the South Italian peasant, there would be no danger of starvation in India for a good time to come.

In other words, it doesn't even take Miracle Rice, fertilizers, and a high-energy civilization to hold off utter disaster in the developing countries. It only takes adding technology to traditional peasant skills—indeed, the kind of thing advocated by E.F. Schumacher in his SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL-ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED. Showing people how to use Mylar and simple non-persistent fungicides for food storage along with peasant agricultural methodology will hold the line against famine—for a while.

Moreover, we
have
new technologies. There
are
means for increasing protein production. More protein in childhood would cut back infant diseases like kwashiorkor and "red baby"; those diseases have the effect of permanently lowering adult IQ by about 20 points. What if the next generation of a developing country were "20 IQ points" more intelligent? For many of the ignorant of the world are not stupid; but they may be
stunted.

But the doomsters have an answer. If we help those people feed themselves, they'll only breed to famine again. Worse, they'll demand industry. They'll strip-mine phosphates and poison the seas (as shown by Cousteau on a recent film). What's the point of helping them? Doom is still around the corner.

The best answer is that historically people haven't done it. When nations reach a high level of technology—and of infant survival—the fertility rate falls. The US appeared to be an exception to that with the WWII "baby boom," but now that squiggle in the fertility rate has passed. The girls born in 1944 are 35 now, leaving their child-bearing period, and the number of girls born per fertile girl in the US has fallen to an all-time low: so low that now one occasionally hears economists advocate bonuses for larger families! The same is true of the other industrialized nations. Populations of wealthy nations do
not
rise without limit.

Yet—in our schools and colleges and universities straight unadulterated Malthusianism is taught and learned and has become "conventional wisdom."

* * *

There's another form of doom not so fashionably discussed: the Marching Morons (that is, the least successful tend to have the most children). It's a problem we must face; but it's doubtful that before the year 2000, or even 2500, it will have destroyed our social institutions.

As a matter of fact, given present population trends, the US won't have very many more people in 2000 than now. Population
is
growing, albeit slowly: there's a "bow wave" generated by the World War II "baby boom," and of course there is always immigration—both legal and illegal. Still, best projections show us peaking in about 2025 with population then declining to its present level—where it will stay.

Suppose that never happens, and we reach 350 million people before something stops US population growth. The area of the United States is about 9.5 million square kilometers; of that, some is water, and some simply uninhabitable. Call it 8 million even, and we have a present population of about 26 people per square kilometer.

If we reach 350 million people—and few projections show us getting there in 50 or even 100 years—we would have 43.5 people/km
²
, a big increase. Some writers say that we will be driven stark, staring mad by overcrowding, and this well before 2020 AD; Asimov, recall, expects Doom before the year 2000, primarily from this cause.

We'll be inundated with personal contacts, at each other's throats, sleeping in hallways and abandoned automobiles; mothers will kill and eat their children; few will have any incentive to work; all except the
very
rich will be in utter misery as civilization collapses.

Well, what civilized countries have population densities higher than our doom-level of 43.5 that we might reach in 50 years?

Practically all of them. West Germany, a not uncivilized place, has 244 people/km
²
, equivalent to 1.9
billion
people in the US! Denmark has 114 people/km
²
; France 93; England and Wales, 322. Even Scotland, with its highlands and islands and hills and moors has 66.

What densities can people stand and remain sane? No one really has an answer to that. But the Netherlands, a charming place, has 319 people/km
²
; the Channel Islands has 641; and Monaco, the densest place on Earth, has 16,000!

Of course the U.S. could not be packed like Monaco or England. We would not like it if our country were as thickly populated as Denmark (although our eastern seaboard is more densely populated in some places right now); but surely we would not all go insane if we lived as close together as the Scots!

And note well—Europe has
always
been the most densely populated area of the Earth; far more so than Latin America or Asia. Latin America, in fact, is almost under populated compared to Europe.

No: our civilization will
not
collapse from overcrowding, at least not in the foreseeable future; and the silly assertions about imminent DOOM from crowding come mostly from a failure to do elementary calculations. (Incidentally: although our schools abound with doom crying teachers, there is a hopeful sign, namely, that pocket calculators are readily available and very cheap. What will happen when the nation is ruled by a generation that habitually uses elementary arithmetic because it's easy and one doesn't make mistakes? The effect could be highly beneficial.)

Moreover, we have the technology right now to support a large population while preserving wilderness. Soleri's
Arcologies
is a fascinating book he shows enormous cities providing for millions built on a few square miles of land, leaving parks and woodlands around them.

We even have the technology to make the
whole Earth
a park if we really wanted to: by going to space for our messiest operations we could end most pollution on this planet; in a hundred years we could, if we'd just get to work, restore practically all of North America to her pristine state.

Less ambitiously, I have "designed" a city for a story about Los Angeles in the future: in my design, a 50-level building contains lodging, stores, conveniences, recreation, employment, and the transportation for 250,000 people. The "Independency of Todos Santos" is 2 miles on a side and sits on an area 4 miles on a side; 250,000 people in 16 square miles. Fewer than a hundred such buildings would hold the entire U.S. non-farm population—and my structure is not only small by Paulo Soleri's standards, but uses very little technology we don't already have.

When Larry and I began our story, incidentally, we thought it a bit far-fetched that people might prefer to live in our "city" rather than in suburbs. Now we've seen condominiums with full conveniences, recreation, transportation, even employment; they cost more than the suburbs, yet most of their inhabitants are refugees from suburbia. It no longer seems fantastic at all. Why not live in a convenient place where you can walk to work, take an escalator to the opera, and a train to the beach? Why fight commuter traffic?

* * *

The evidence is plain: the population bomb will not kill us, nor even drive us mad, within our lifetimes. Certainly we can't keep on doubling populations as fast as we have in the past—but why assume that we will? When the Reverend Thomas Malthus made his gloomy predictions, someone blindly running off the exponential growth equations (doomcryers are fascinated by exponential growth, although I don't know of a single case of it in nature) would have calculated that England in 1970 would have 400 million people instead of the present 55 million.

Population stability won't happen of itself, but most of the really alarming population growth has been through the prolonging of life. Birth rates have declined through this century, but people live longer' despite wars, famines, pollution, insecticides, crowding, and all the other forms of doom. Since there's a limit to just how long anyone can live, the death rate is due to climb before 2000. Already many countries have aging populations; including the US of course. It was never true since Colonial times that "over half of the people are under 25" and it gets less true all the time. Much of the "population explosion" is a one-time artifact, and you can't simply apply equations of exponential growth to predict the future.

Certainly population pressure
can
finish us off; but why believe we'll get to the
Soylent Green
stage before something is done about it? The evidence is that the technologically advanced countries, and even some not so advanced, such as China, have already done something about it; and certainly we won't be destroyed by overpopulation before 2020 or even 2100.

* * *

If we have defused, or at least delayed, the population bomb, what's the next thing to kill us? Asimov says that if we survive going mad from overcrowding we'll still be finished because of energy limits.

We've dealt with this in another chapter; there are non-polluting systems to supply us with all the energy we need to run not only Western high-energy civilization, but to industrialize the world. Ocean Thermal; Solar Power Satellites; hydrogen fusion; any one would do the job provided we have the gumption to build it.

Another doom, the rising levels of carbon dioxide which convert our planet into a sterile hothouse, falls to quantitative analysis: it's true enough that the levels of CO
₂
in our atmosphere have risen since 1900, but not so sharply as all that; and before they can get to a point where they do any real damage, we'll have run out of fossil fuels to burn. It's true we should concern ourselves with the climatic future of the planet—there's evidence that we're about due for an Ice Age—and some evidence that we'd be in one
now,
if it were not for all the fuels we've burned and the heat we've introduced. But that too is something we can deal with, provided we don't lose faith in ourselves.

In fact—on any careful analysis we're not doomed at all. Quite the opposite. We have it in our power to go to space; to liberate man from the prison of Earth; to get humanity spread across a number of planets and moons and space colonies so that no one disaster can exterminate us.

We can turn the Earth into a park

This is the first generation in history to not only be concerned about ecology and conservation, but also to have the resources to do something practical about them without condemning much of the world to starvation. This generation can give Mankind the stars and planets.

We live in one of the most exciting times of all history. Surely we can do better than cry Doom!

The young lady was very serious, and although I might have wished that she looked like an ogre with raucous voice and nose and chin meeting in front of her lips, she was actually very professional in appearance, highly attractive, and according to most objective standards, intelligent. My wife and I had come to a typical Los Angeles show-business party, and the young lady had been waiting for me. Before I could get properly into the room she advanced menacingly.

"You write science fiction," she accused. "Escapism. What good does it do to get people dreaming about that Buck Rogers Stuff?" (I swear it, she used that phrase, the same one that countless teachers used in the days of my youth when they caught me reading Astounding Science Fiction.)

Naturally, she had A Cause. "We spent billions for what? For some pieces of rock and pretty pictures on television!

And there are millions out of jobs, we need better schools, and—"

Readers have probably had similar experiences and can finish off the speech for themselves. It's not the only time I've been put to The Question: "Why throw money away on space when there's so much that needs doing here on Earth?" All right, let's talk about space and see just how far we can get.

First, for a really beautiful job of presenting what we've already got out of space, see the NASA SPINOFF documents; they print another each year, and they tell what new economic impact space research has had on American lives.