Word: neo
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...than a century of intermittent haunting, the ghost of a gloomy British clergyman, Thomas Robert Malthus, was on the rampage last week. Cresting a wave of postwar pessimism, it flashed through the air on the radio, rode through the mails in magazines. Publishers opened their arms and presses to "Neo-Malthusian" manuscripts prophesying worldwide overpopulation and hunger. Two "scarce books"-Our Plundered Planet, by Fairfield Osborn, and Road to Survival (a Book-of-the-Month selection), by William Vogt-were glowingly reviewed and selling like hot cakes. Their influence has already reached around the world...
Played-Out Planet? The Neo-Malthusians admit that he was wrong. But they claim that new and frightening threats have developed recently. The present-day world, they say, has no fresh lands (or almost none) to cultivate. Its old lands, "plundered" by reckless exploitation, are losing fertility as their "irreplaceable topsoil" washes down the rivers. Farmlands cannot maintain their present production. The world's population is still increasing rapidly, and modern medicine, by cutting the death rate from infectious diseases, is sure to quicken this increase. The falling food-production curve, cry the Neo-Malthusians, will soon cross...
...Neo-Malthusian propaganda has, on the face of it, a high and beneficent purpose: to favor good farming practices. A similar erosion scare in the 19305 did result in widespread adoption of erosion-control practices. Some of the clear implications of the present scare, however, give unintended comfort to political and social policies that are anything but beneficent. If even rich nations like the U.S. have, too little land to keep their people passably well fed (as some of the doom-criers try to prove), then what should they do? The answer, for any vigorous people, is obvious...
...Neo-Malthusians want to warn man of danger; but their alarm is so loud that it may have the effect of deafening the world to its opportunities. To the real agricultural scientists, close to the soil and its sciences, such pessimism sounds silly or worse. Every main article of the Neo-Malthusian creed, they say, is either false or distorted or unprovable. They are sure that the modern world has both the soil and the scientific knowledge to feed, and feed well, twice as many people as are living today. By the time population has increased that much...
...other side of the Yard, the ton-and-a-quarter iron monster suspended in the neo-gothic tower of Memorial Hall counts off the hours all day long. Like the bells of St. Paul's, it is operated by heavy weights which slide down the inside of the tower and turn the clock. The most venerable college bell now in use, it was presented by the alumni shortly before the turn of the century...