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the lead with which they lined their wine containers).
12.But the threat is not limited to pesticides. Barry Commoner predicts an agricultural crisis in the
150 United States within fifty years from the action of our fertilizers, which will either ultimately destroy soil
fertility or lead to pollution of the national water supply. At another comer of the new technology, the
SST* threatens not only to shake us with its boom, but to affect the amount of cloud cover (and climate) by
155 its contrails**. And I have not even mentioned the standard pollution problems of smoke, industrial
effluents into lakes and rivers, or solid wastes. Suffice it to report that a 1968 UNESCO Conference
concluded that man has only about twenty years to go before the planet starts to become uninhabitable
because of air pollution alone. Of course «starts to» is imprecise; I am reminded of a cartoon of an
industrialist looking at his billowing smoke-stacks, in front of which a forlorn figure is holding up a
placard that says: «We have only 35 years to go», The caption reads, «Boy, that shook me up for a minute.
I thought it said 3 to 5 years».
*SST — supersonic transport plane
**contrail — the visible condensation of water droplets or ice crystals from the atmosphere, occurring in the wake of an aircraft or
missile under certain conditions.
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13. I have left until last the grimmest and gravest threats of all, speaking now on behalf of the steerage.
This is the looming inability of the great green earth to bring forth sufficient food to maintain life, even at
the miserable threshhold of subsistence at which it is now endured by perhaps a third of the world's
170 population. The problem here is the very strong likelihood that population growth will inexorably outpace
whatever improvements in fertility and productivity we will be able to apply to the earth's mantle
(including the watery fringes of the ocean where sea «farming» is at least technically imaginable).
175 14. Here the race is basically between two forces: on the one hand, those that give promise that the rate
of population increase can be curbed (if not totally halted); and on the other, those that give promise of
increasing the amount of sustenance we can wring from the soil.
180 15. Ultimately the problem posed by Malthus must be faced — that population tends to increase
geometrically, by doubling; and that agriculture does not; so that eventually population must face the limit
of a food barrier.
16.The Malthusian prophecy has been so often «refuted», as economists have pointed to the astonishing
185 rates of growth of food output in the advanced nations, that there is a danger of dismissing the warnings of
the Ehrlichs as merely another premature alarm. To do so would be a fearful mistake. For unlike Malthus,
who assumed that technology would remain constant, the Ehrlichs have made ample allowance for the
190 growth of technological capability, and their approach to the impending catastrophe is not shrill. They
merely point out that a mild version of the Malthusian solution is already upon us, for at least half a billion
195 people are chronically hungry or outright starving, and another 1 1/2 billion under or malnourished. Thus
we do not have to wait for «gigantic inevitable famine»; it has already come.
17.What is more important is that the Ehrlichs see the matter in a fundamentally different perspective
200 from Malthus, not as a problem involving supply and demand, but as one involving a total ecological
equilibrium. The crisis, as the Ehrlichs see it, is thus both deeper and more complex than merely a shortage
of food, although the latter is one of its more horrendous evidences. What threatens the Spaceship Earth is a
205 profound imbalance between the totality of systems by which human life is maintained, and the totality of
demands, industrial as well as agricultural, technological as well as demographic, to which that capacity to
support life is subjected.
18. I have no doubt that one can fault bits and pieces of the Ehrlichs' analysis, and there is a note of
210 determined pessimism in their work that leads me to suspect (or at least hope) that there is somewhat more
time for adaptation than they suggest. Yet I do not see how their basic conclusion can be denied. Beginning
within our lifetimes and rising rapidly to crisis proportions in our children's, a challenge faces humankind
215 comparable to none in its history, with the possible exception of the forced migrations of the Ice Age. It is
with the responses to this crisis that I wish to end this essay, for telling and courageous as the Ehrlichs'
analysis is, I do not believe that even they have fully faced up to the implications that their own findings
220 present.
19. The first of these I have already stated: it is the clear conclusion that the underdeveloped countries
can never hope to achieve parity with the developed countries. Given our present and prospective
225 technology, there are simply not enough resources to permit a «Western» rate of industrial exploitation to
be expanded to a population of four billion — much less eight billion — persons. It may well be that most