Eighty years on

PERSONAL COLUMN

SIMON RAVEN

First, some figures. At the current rate of increase, the population of the earth, presently of the order of 3,000 million, will be over 7.000 million by the year 2000 AD and not far short of 15,000 million fifty years after that. It will have multiplied by five times in eighty years.

Second, a qualification. In this -e§Aay I propose to consider the problem of popu- lation as it affects the United Kingdom alone. My readers may care to reflect, how- ever, that what is still only a problem here has already become a crisis in many other places, that whereas I can still use words like 'pressing' or 'urgent', writers of other nationalities are searching for superlatives of 'desperate'.

Third, a very simple illustration. When I fast came to live in a small seaside borough a few years ago, there was a path about a mile and a half long, which ran between the upper and lower districts of the town. It was called Church Path, and for much of its way it passed through fields, meadows and pleasant little patches of leafy wilderness. Every day I found some reason to walk along this footpath, and out of habit and affection I still do. The differ- ence is that I must now take care not to be run over. Luckily this is not difficult, as there is nothing to distract my attention, on either side, except for rank upon rank of identical breeding boxes.

And fourth, a piece of prophecy. In the early 'sixties, Anthony Burgess wrote a novel called The Wanting Seed. It; told of a time about a century hence, when the whole of Southern England had become one vast conurbation, all food was rationed and most of it synthetic, and the sole kind of alcohol to be had was an anonymous gin so disgusting that it could only be drunk when heavily diluted by a slightly less disgusting chemical called fruit juice'. Women were allowed but not encouraged to bear one child each; to become pregnant a second time was a serious offence, even if one paid for the obligatory abortion one- self. Homosexuality was not only smiled upon, it was virtually enforced, a happy marriage being a serious impediment whether to social acceptance or to a pro- fessional career.

In any case, why labour the point? The figures which I gave in my first paragraph are quoted by some or other responsible publication about three times every week. We all of us have our own Church Path.

And anyone with the smallest powers of observation must know perfectly well that continuing increase in our population will eventually lead to a state of affairs which will differ from that foretold by Anthony Burgess only in being nastier by far. We have been thoroughly and repeatedjy warn- ed; by statisticians, by biologists, by demo- graphers, by savants of every description, and not least by our own common sense.

So what are we doing about it? There is still time. To what use are the citizens and

leaders of the United Kingdom putting our real but rapidly diminisMng period of grace?

If there has been little intelligent dis- cussion and even less intelligent action, we may console ourselves by remarking that there has been a great variety of attitudes. The most common of these is simply to ignore the whole issue. Mention the prob- blem of population to a politician or well placed civil servant, and you will be answered either by a glazed look, indicative of boredom and total unconcern, or by a swift shake of the head, which is to tell you that you have committed a social solecism roughly on a par with failing to button your fly.

Another attitude, a shade more thought- ful but almost equally dismissive, might be summarised as 'God disposes'. Those who profess this view do at least recog- nise that a problem exists, but they main- tain that it would be futile and impertinent in mere human beings to meddle with their destiny. A comparable attitude may be found in the intellectual pessimist, who holds that men have richly deserved any fate that may be coming to them, and is happy to abandon them to it. Such people one may at least respect (for the teller of doom has always been a poetic figure), and cer- tainly they 'are both more dignified and more intelligent than the liberal optimists, who, like the pessimist, see no need for positive action, but in their case because they sincerely believe that a favourable solution will automatically present itself.

For the means are there, the liberal opti- mists will tell you with their radiant and fatuous smiles, and all that is needed is a little good will; so let us have life and have it more abundantly. But how shall we feed all this life? Well, if all else fails, we hear that the scientists can now extract an edible substance from marine plankton. (Benign smirk here, as if millions of tons of edible plankton were already stored in ware- houses all over Britain.) Then what about living space? Oh, there's still plenty of that: last summer, when we were bicycling through the Lake District . . . And so on. To none of these kindly and sanguine gentlemen does it occur, apparently, that methods of turning plankton into a practic- able source of human nourishment are still, in so far as they exist at all, cumbrous and primitive, or that if we use our re- maining open spaces to house a swollen population we shall have nowhere left in which to restore our sanity and health.

And then, of course, we have the naive fanatics who propound that 'the human experience' is a 'right', and that any attempt to regulate the numbers who par- take in it is a selfish and brutal repression of aspiring (if still unborn) mankind. We have men who sense a threat to the exer- cise of their virility. We have women, a great many women, to whom all babies, however superfluous to the needs of family or nation, are miracles of a female creative process so profound and so prodigious that any scheme to limit its operation would be denounced as a profaning of woman- hood. Or we have the cynics, who opine that 'things will just about hold up for my time and yours, old boy, so why worry?'

And closely akin to these we have the men of industry and commerce, who remind us that a drop in the population means a drop

in sales means a drop in production, em- ployment and prosperity. Indeed, we have every conceivable attitude except for the one we most need—the determination to preserve the amenity of this world and the dignity of the human race in the only way this can be done, which is by limiting and if necessary reducing our numbers to accord with the areas and resources known to be available.

Now, for many obvious reasons this is a huge and perhaps an impossible task; but if we don't succeed in it, human life of any quality at all will perish from the earth, and therefore we must surely try. We have no rational alternative. Why, then, since the calamitous facts are clearly known and often stated, do we find that human re- actions to them are as perverse or imbecile as those I have described above? Boredom, dismissal and fatalism; fatuity, complacence and priapic vanity; chatter about profit and loss, egomaniac mother-earth fantasies, and just plain rant—is this the best that man, proud man, can do when threatened either with extinction or with a life scarcely fit for crablice?

It would certainly seem so, and this brings me to the paramount point which I wish to urge. For I am not writing to put forward a solution (I am not competent) nor am I suggesting that a solution can be easily found: what I am saying is that an early and earnest effort to find such a solu- tion is clearly vital to the future of our island and our people, and it is there- fore depressing, to say the least of it, to find that our attitudes to the problem amount, all in all, to cretinous indifference.

For the popular assumption appears to be (in so far as the matter receives any attention at all) that a fairy godmother called 'planning' can conjure up accom- ,modation for an indefinite increase in our numbers. Eighty million people in the UK by such a year? Seventy-five per cent of all families owning cars? Nothing to it: a wave of the wand, and all the empty churches become multi-storied car parks ,overnight, all those gloomy old forests are changed—presto—into housing estates. But what have you got, good Fairy Planning, when the last church and the last tree have

gone? Well, you've got people, haven't you, and they're the most important thing . . .

except for cars of course. If you say so, madam; but pray allow me to observe that if you persist in banishing absolutely everything else to make room for cars and people, the numbers of both will increase faster than ever, and sooner or later you will have nowhere left—nowhere—to put any more of either. In short, a time must come when you will be compelled to cut back the population (if it doesn't starve to death first), so why not make a start now, while our island is still tolerably commod- ious to live in?

Such a simple lesson, one would have thought: more, in this instance at least, must mean worse. But apparently no one understands this, and until it is generally understood no action can be taken; for since any possible method of limiting the numbers of our society is bound to include restrictive and even painful elements at first, no such method can be suggested, let alone tried out, until people have been got to understand the enormous disaster which it would avert and the enormous benefits it would confer. So why, I con- clude by asking, are people at large not being more forcibly informed of this dis-

aster and these benefits? Mr Wilson, Mrs Castle, Mr Wedgwood Benn? Mr Heath, Mr Maudling, Mr Powell? Lord Annan, Lord Robbins, Lord Soper? Can't any of you tell me why?