Living Room: A Personal Review/Essay

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In scholarly terms I cannot improve on Kenneth E. Bouldmg’s superb review of Population Resources and the Future (Dialogue, 8 [Autumn/Winter 1973], 159- 163). However, I feel that I can face the issue more squarely and with more deep concern than he could. I am a born Mormon. I doubt that I would have been a Mormon otherwise, but nevertheless I’ve never renounced my faith nor do I intend to do so. I am proud of my Mormon heritage, but this does not preclude my questioning within my cultural upbringing about the world, or worlds, in which I live. 

I wish that I could accept the basic premises advanced by the editors and writers of Population Resources that the world is not faced with a serious population question, that there is no need to curtail population growth, that the major need is to change only living styles and establish new distribution patterns. I admire the faith expressed in the first paragraph of the Introduction—that man, through continual processes of enlightenment, can control his future. That is much like the faith I held back in 1956 when I went abroad, as one of several thousand Americans, to participate in translating the great idealism of President Truman’s Point Four program into reality. After years of mostly failures in this line of thought and work, my idealism weakened, but I was not yet willing to accept defeat. Perhaps, I thought, I had absorbed too much of the Asian philosophy of fatalism (of which, incidentally, there is a strong infusion in Mormon thought as well). I took stock of the situation in 1969 as a Senior Scholar at the Institute of Advanced Projects located at the East West Center in Hawaii. A year of quiet reading and study, a marvelous intellectual tonic, renewed my faith in man’s ability to cope and control his destiny, and off I went again for another “crack” at the impossible. To me, the American Dream still remained a World Dream. 

I was greatly alarmed at that time, as well as now, about the accelerating deterioration of the world environment, and especially the growing food population gap. I was critical of the United States’ foreign assistance policy, which in an article I caustically summed up as “If you cannot feed them, you kill them.” In other words, the simplistic approach of increasing food production through the means of so-called miracle seeds (popularly and appropriately called the Green Revolution) and population control through the means of so-called miracle birth control technologies (pills and IUD’s), popularly and appropriately called family planning, was doomed to failure—and fail it did. (See my “Failure in Technical As sistance Abroad in Public Administration,” Journal of Comparative Administration, 2 [May 1970], 3-51.) 

I decided that the best way to get at the world problem of food shortages was by working on the food production and not the population reduction side. I believed— and I still do—that the management of water was the key to increased food production. My renewed faith, however, was very short-lived, three years at the most. What shattered my faith in this approach was a trip around the world in 1970, one of many, but this one was different because I saw more starvation than I ever want to see again. There were just too many people, increasing at too rapid a rate. I need not recount here the stupendous data to this effect except to note that the sum total of new mouths each year is in the neighborhood of seventy or seventy-five million. 

I came to the conclusion then that population control, at least to the extent of controlling the alarming rate of population growth, is urgently needed if we are to avoid human disaster beyond anything yet experienced in history. As if by a call from the “High and Mighty,” I was invited in October 1972 to head a high-level team to study the population problem and particularly to prepare background papers on the administration of population/family planning programs for the forthcoming United Nations World Population Conference, to be held in August 1974 at Bucharest, Romania. This was being hailed as the first authentic international conference ever held on the population question and as an event to mark the climax of the World Population Year. The hope was that this world forum would examine honestly and openly the population question and come up with realistic solutions. But by December 1973 it was clear that there would be no room for discussions or solutions—only for confrontations. 

The Conference produced nothing more than a spectacular display of verbal fireworks. The representatives from the two countries with the world’s largest populations, India and China, made it abundantly clear that they had no intention of curbing their population growth. They claimed that neo-Malthusian thinking was nothing more than a clandestine plot of a few affluent (namely Western) countries to preserve their position of economic advantage. Taking a line similar to that of the editors of Population Resources and the Future, they insisted that the basic problem was simply redistribution of wealth and opportunities. 

One-third of the world is now either Chinese or Indian. At the turn of the century it could be one-half. The world may soon be caught in a major racial struggle for survival. 

Since January 1974, I have withdrawn entirely from any effort associated with international development programs. I regard it as a hopeless activity. I am taking seriously the admonition of Church leaders to store one or more year’s supply of foodstuffs. Over two-thirds of the world is now hungry, and this proportion will steadily, if not dramatically, increase. I accept the often-quoted statistic that the world’s food supplies are now adequate for less than thirty days. We have been warned by our prophets that famine will soon appear at our doors and that we should be prepared. I strongly believe in their warnings. 

This makes it all the more difficult for me to understand or accept the emphasis on breeding to the limit which is so often encountered in the Church. I find it rather perplexing, if not ironic, that much of the Mormon rationale—so skilfully articulated in this book—for large families is similar to that expressed consciously or unconsciously in those regions of the world now suffering the most from unbridled population growth. In times of socio-economic uncertainty, the family, and particularly the large extended-type family, may be the best social means for individual survival, but paradoxically it is also this institution which stifles economic development (a subject too complex to discuss here). Knowing this, my only consolation in reading this book is that there are only three million or so Mormons in the world and their social performance in producing large families does not contribute very much to the total problem. 

Nevertheless, there still remains a moral question, as Professor Boulding pointed out in his review. He noted, although not in these words, that what is good for an individual is not necessarily good for a group and what is good for a group is not necessarily good for a society. Mormons, in this age of declining resources, gain group advantages at the expense of the larger society. Boulding so states and I so believe. 

To Professors Bahr, Chadwick, and Thomas, along with the contributors to their book, I issue this challenge: put your philosophy and theories to work in your own backyard. The small valleys nestled along the Wasatch Front represent a microcosm of the problem at hand. Each time I return to Utah (and I’ve been doing this for nigh on to twenty years now), I grow more distressed about the future of the good life in these lovely valleys. I feel confident that Brigham Young would weep if he could see the desecration taking place in the “Land of Zion.” Where have gone the lovely fruit orchards, the undulating grass lands, the clean air, and the lovely compact hamlets? The ugly urban sprawl has erased much that was unique and beautiful in pioneer Zion. Greedy subdividers are busily at work carving out little quarter-acre ranchettes for single-dwelling families with three or more children. My concern is where will the next generation get their ranchettes? Traditionally, Utah has solved its population problems through out-migration. The educated young, much like the proverbial lemmings, march off to new lands, and in the past this has usually meant Southern California. But such opportunities are now being rapidly closed off. These lands are also largely filled up. What will happen when the Wasatch Front population is redoubled and then redoubled again? 

In response some say that the day of the single dwelling on its own plot of land is over. I tend to agree, and so do the editors of this book, I believe. But can we agree that this represents human progress? I have lived in such conditions in New York City, in a small cave in a gigantic mountain. I don’t like “cliff-dwelling” living. Thus I find disturbing the editors’ claims that the United States and other regions of the world can support much higher population densities. The editors quote from Otto Fredrich on page eight: “England and Germany prosper even though they have a population density greater than that of India. And the Japanese are demonstrating that the world’s most thickly populated nation may also become its richest.” This was obviously written before the current energy crisis. Japan could be an ecological disaster. England has serious economic problems. Germany admittedly progresses, though less easily than before. But a good many people, including myself, do not wish to live in conditions of high population density as found in many regions of the world. We practice what we believe by keeping our procreation levels low, and we rightfully feel put upon under the present institutional arrangements by those who wish to procreate to a higher level. I had two children and reared another child. This is a sufficient number to maintain a tolerable level of population growth. Why should I bear any of the social costs for those couples who wish to procreate beyond this number at home or abroad? 

Nevertheless, the present institutional and social systems discriminate against me and other who share the same opinion. We do not like this but can do little about it. This is a political reality that probably will not change in my lifetime. I can only try to escape such an environment, which in a way is what I did by coming to Alaska. Alaska is the United States’ last frontier and I believe its last hope. The state’s frontier is not to be found in its vast exploitable resources but rather in its chance of developing a unique set of social institutions and living style. I warmly embrace the state’s “sourdough” socio-economic-politico philosophy: Keep the “outsiders” out and the population small. Let no man see the smoke stack of another person’s house. Live in harmony with God’s creation and beauty; all life is sacred and has its place. It is a wonderful sight to look across a broad, virgin valley and watch the bull moose graze, the furtive wolf amble across the river bottom, and the golden eagle soar high in the heavens. Four hundred thousand people have a playground one fifth the size of the south forty-eight, and the air is sweet and pure. I hope that it stays this way and does not become “people-polluted.” 

But Alaska will probably get caught up in the same maelstrom as the south forty eight, as the entire world. My only solace then will be, “Well, I did have a good life for a brief span of time.” My feelings nevertheless will be pretty much the same as those of Sam in Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man. But this time there will be no opportunity to witness the stream of immigrants and then turn and head “straight north, back into the valleys and mountains.” Those days will have vanished, and in my opinion the world will be much poorer.