Page 20 RAIN April1 980 Dea r RAIN , I was very disappointed by the article in the January 1980 issue entitled "Is Population a Problem ?" The article completely misses the point. Certainly there are other factors involved in many of the problems of the world ... but they need to be tackled in addition to slowing population growth, tlDt instead o( slowing our growth. For example, land and resource distribution is an important area that needs a lot of work, but the fact remains that the land can only support a finite number of people. If we ignore our population size and just concentrate on equal distribution, we will all j'ust end up starving together a few decades ater instead of starving a few at a time, now I Population growth and who controls the land are the problems we have to work on. All of the other points in the article suffer from the same error. We need to work i n each of these areas and slow our growth. Our future depmds on it. Porter Storey, M .D. NashVille, TN Dear Tom and Lane, While I generally respect your writing, your lalest essay, on population, left me wondenng how people in Oregon can have the chutzpah to write about population. Isn't Oregon the state that tells the rest of us to come visit, but don't stay? Some ten years ago, when I was a demography buff, the average population density of Oregon was approximately 30 per square mile, while in my native Massachusetts it was around 650. I'd love to send you most of the people in southern New England, the New York metropolitan area and New Jersey, so that some summer I could have a Cape Cod beach to myself, or so that land values would plummet to where I could afford half an acre. I would love to see the return of all the wildlife that left New England when if became too crowded. rf you really think that meditation can replace " huge tracts of preserved wilderness," COl11e live in the Boston-Washington corridor for a year, that urban agglomeration that stretches longer than your Orego.n coastline, and you'll find you miss Oregon so badly you won't be able to stand it. You say that " our cultural heritage of 'wide-open spaces' blinds us to the value of dose commumty and of self-development In close interaction with others." Yet sense of community exists more strongly in small towns lprovided they are not boomtowns) than in places like Washington, D.C. and New York City. This is because too much of anything can breed contempt for that thing. Consider the cockroach, ar, interesting little bug taken one at a time. I have watched one clean its body like a cat. But a kitchen infested with cockroaches will turn anyone's stomach . And who doesn't love birds? Yet, Alfred Hitchcock's movie Tire Birds demonstrates that even they can become noisome in too large a dose. Thmk about people. They generally don't even look up at you during tush hour in down· town Washington, yet they are invariably friendly on a wiidernes5 trail. One of my loudest complaints is that you seem to misunderstand some of the natural phenomena that you talk about. Your contention that we need to breed to ward off the possibility of extinction is incorrect even if, as you say, "the whole spectrum of antibiotics is expected to be useless by about 1985" (I S'uspect that's an exaggeration). Epidemics do not kill off entire populations. The Bubonic Plague killed onethird of the population of Northern Europe, hardly putting the human race in danger of extinction. However, this breeding which you advocate will certainly increase the danger of an epidemic, which is not a pleasant prospect for anyone. To understand why this is 50, consider modem agriculture. Every 50 often, some crop undergoes a blight, such as the corn blight of 1970. This is because vast acres of any crop IS a gold mine for the pest that feeds on that When I was a demography buff, the average population of Oregon was 30 p / sm, while in my native Massachusetts it was around 650. crop. However, blights are rare in natural ecological systems, and when they occur, it is often because of some human-caused disturbance. Concentrations of human populations are like a monoculture, and as such they invite epidemics. The thing that bothers me most about your essay is that it ignores the rest of nature. There is arrogance in a view that advocates breeding people into every COrner of the globe, without regard for the consequences to other species. In nature, the population of one species never expands without the contraction or extinction of other species, except when a new ecological nicht' is opened up, as when the first amphibian-like fish crawled out onto land. The rapid ~xpansion of the hu~ man population over the last three hundred years has brought about the extinction of more than 200 fo rms of birds and mammals (not to mention reptiles, amphibians, plants, and invertebrates). In most cases, the living space of other species is usurped, the same way Native Americans lost their territory. Large animals, and animals that feed high upon the food chain, such as eagles, are hardest hit by human expansion. They need vast areas to support not only their own breeding populations, but the breeding populations of the species they feed on, and the breeding populations of the species that their prey species feed on, etc. There must be ten times as much body weight of prey species as of predator species, so the amount of land necessary to support one large beast feeding on the fourth or fifth rung of the food chain is huge. This means that national parks are more like museums than true wildlife preservation areas if they are surrounded by anything but wilderness. "More people means less for ~veryone , or so the story goes. But less of what?" you ask. Are you aware that elephants and rhinoceroses are in danger of becoming extinct? You ral5l·d some good poi:nts about the values of western civilization, resource allocation, and forced sterilization. But to blame advocates of zero population growth is false, and d()es a gross disservice to people who are trying to think through these issues. It should be obvious that the human race cannot increase its numbers for much longer. Why not stop now, while some of the earth's natural heritage remains? David Holzm an, Editor PeQple & Eller8Y
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